To follow Liars’ long, prolific, often paradoxical career is to discover a band as erratic as it is true to itself. Across 17 years and multiple continents, they’ve remained contemporary avant-garde music’s household chameleon. Smirking punk-funk, acerbic drone-dance, existentialist bar rock, and disquieting synth pop find common ground in the band’s catalog, with each dissimilar form somehow catalyzing the next. On a granular level, no two Liars albums truly sound alike, even as they’ve all been unmistakably the work of core songwriters Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill. Pull back far enough, however, and a trend emerges. From their auspicious beginnings as four Brooklyn-based upstarts to their heyday as a convention-bucking trio to their reinvention as an electronic duo, Liars have progressively distilled their music down to its essence.
So maybe it was just a matter of time until that process reached its logical conclusion. In 2014, the undercooked dance tracks on Mess felt like a creative low point, and not only because WIXIW’s poignant electronica had been a more appealing display of their talents two years prior. It was as if Andrew and Hemphill had all but discarded their band’s beating heart: the tension that blooms when experimental music is retrofitted with pop structures. Mess was brash and obvious, a play at simplicity from artists who built their names on confounding expectations. It would also prove to be the last Liars album written as a group. Following the “death” of their creative relationship, the founding duo of Liars was reduced to a solo act. Andrew, the towering, de facto frontman, soldiered on with the project, relocating from L.A. to his native Australia and treating his newfound artistic autonomy like a golden opportunity for revitalization.
Whether as a result of the unusual circumstances or because he tends to thrive when adapting to the unfamiliar, Andrew’s first solo record is at once recognizable and unlike anything else in his catalog. Called TFCF, an acronym that stands for “Theme From Crying Fountain,” it’s an album about loneliness and heartbreak conceived in self-imposed isolation. During a recent AMA on Reddit, Andrew explained TFCF’s artwork and impetus: “I felt like I was married to Aaron [Hemphill] creatively, and now that he is gone I am alone in my wedding dress. The record is basically the theme music for our creative relationship deteriorating.” It was nestled away on an island off the coast of Sydney, reachable only by boat, that the latest and undoubtedly strangest phase of Liars was born. Opting for self-reflective nostalgia and internal turmoil over any sense of extroversion, it’s the ultimate fakeout for a band as restless as Liars.
In listening to TFCF, however, it’s obvious this wasn’t always the plan. The 11-song tracklist is riddled with tangents, one-off larks, and various stylistic indulgences, but it’s all nonetheless connected by the rampant use of recycled audio. The music is made in part from the scrapped recordings of what could have been the final Liars album, which only adds to the lyrical pathos. As Andrew said in an interview with The Skinny, he began recording ideas alone in an L.A. studio while Hemphill was living in Berlin, and wound up with “thousands of files” that would become the basis of TFCF. At the end of “No Help Pamphlet,” one of a few acoustic guitar songs here, Andrew shares a pre-recorded message seemingly meant for his distant bandmate: “OK, that’s it. Those are all the songs I really like… I hope that you have a really great break. And I’m thinking of you all the time.”
After the album’s downtrodden opening third, “Face to Face With My Face” introduces violent, brooding electronics like a reassurance that TFCF isn’t all sadness and bewilderment. Andrew also has some personal soul searching to do, and that’s where he excels. At his most thorny and mystic, Andrew seems to channel Thom Yorke’s solo work through the lens of Throbbing Gristle. Then there are tracks like the curious “No Tree No Branch,” a sort of kaleidoscopic folk-punk jaunt that’s one of the catchiest and most bizarre Liars songs in recent memory. But this is also where Andrew subtly weaves together the threads of his past. The singalong bridge in “Cred Woes” can be traced as far back as 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top; Sisterworld’s raw instrumentation and the ominous fragility of WIXIW fill out TFCF’s every corner; and even Liars’ lightning-in-a-bottle masterwork, Drum’s Not Dead, bears out its influence in the percussive blasts driving “Coins in My Caged Fist.”
If this all reads as a scattershot, stream-of-consciousness album, that could very well be the point. Andrew has offered a glimpse of his headspace during an especially pivotal time in his life; it only makes sense that what’s revealed is emotional and capricious. On paper, the jangly, medieval pomp of “Cliché Suite” couldn’t be further removed from the heavy boom-bap of “Staring at Zero” or the sullen dirge of “The Grand Delusional.” And the resonant bass drones and airy field recordings of “Emblems of Another Story” would seem to contradict that injured ballad’s heartfelt immediacy. But those glaring conflicts become one of the album’s strengths. We may not fully understand every awkward, splintered idea on display, but the closer we look at TFCF’s affecting exquisite corpse the more we can appreciate why and how Andrew stitched it together. This earnest, well-crafted jumble couldn’t be a more appropriate marker of the irrepressible project’s evolution, nor a more fitting testament to Liars’ legacy.
