The Tenebrous Liar – Jackknifed and Slaughtered

Bleak, bare-boned, and brash—the third album from The Tenebrous Liar was a confusing one to fathom. There are only two basic reactions one could have to this music, and I experienced both in the course of listening to it.

Before the CD even reaches the player, your mind might be made up. A perusal of the track titles – ‘Suffer You’, ‘Cut Down Your Love’, ‘No Guiding Light’, ‘No Relief’, ‘Is This How it Ends?’ – or a glance at the desolate album art is enough to tell you that this isn’t exactly going to be a party banger. In fact, you’re willing to bet it’ll turn out to be the darkest, angriest, most bitter and depressing album you’ve ever heard. The thudding drums and minimal, sombre bass of the opening, then, puts you immediately in mind of Joy Division, and the first lyrics (something about ‘wriggling in the shit’) only confirm your worst fears. Unless you’re a manic depressive, your negative preconception is now fully formed. What on earth am I about to embark on?

Maybe you’d have given up by this point. I know I nearly did. But, unsurprisingly, a necessity for impartial criticism is actually hearing it out, and a good thing I did, too. My reaction journeyed from one extreme to another as I listened, and it’s still confused, really. But I quite like that—it’s the mark of an interesting album.

On first listen, the impression is one of a mush of near-identical, monotonous songs, in which singer Steve Gullick lazily whines, moans and screams about how bad everything is. The drawling vocal is emotive, but to the point of occasionally being patently out of tune, and not in an effective, Black Francis kind of way. Grinding guitars and slow, square and primal rhythms trudge on as the disc gets gradually more raucous and grim. The lo-fi, raw sound seems outdated and unoriginal, reeking distinctly of the likes of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pavement. I’m all for avoiding glossy, commercial perfection, but the ‘underproduced’ style of the album can just sound amateur in places. This could just be your mate’s dad’s crap band.

But could it? It’s not a comfortable album, but surely that’s a good thing. Through all my cynicism there shone a distinct glint of character that made me replay it, and with more listens the tracks begin to distinguish themselves, relinquishing occasional moments of truly epic, soaring beauty. The incessantly bleak mood suddenly seemed broken up by uplifting, inventive climaxes – the music was still dark, dirty, and dreary, but inspiring for the very fact that it’s fearlessly so. As Gullick has quipped, ‘I’m fairly certain pop stardom isn’t looming’, which aren’t the words of someone looking to make a killing from his music. This is music for its own sake, made lovingly by a true independent-label band doing exactly what they want to do – a fact deserving of respect in our bland world of x-factorism and carbon-copy ‘indie’.

By halfway through the second listen, I was relishing the real experimental feel of the music – its grit and emotional charge, the screaming and burning guitars, the contrast between moving, subtler moments and cataclysmic walls of sound, the sizzling white noise literally attacking the ears. Real highlights are the stripped-down introduction of the title track and the monolithic instrumental at the album’s close. There are moments which I still just can’t like, but they get fewer with each listen.

So Jackknifed and Slaughtered doesn’t do itself any favours by prompting such vividly negative expectations before it’s even played. But I suspect that Gullick and the boys couldn’t have done it differently. The result is an album that weeds out those of narrow mind before it has even got into first gear – it needs time, but if you put in the effort, you’ll be rewarded with a truly interesting listen. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person that dismisses music for being ‘sad’, then save yourself the trouble and go and buy an Alphabeat album; this is about as movingly despairing as it gets.

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