(Einstürzende Neubauten) and Liam Andrews (My Disco) on a starker, sexier, and more expansive debut album proper that's heavily oriented to ritualist late night consumption and tipped for all Neubauten, Suicide, late TG and Silent Servant fiends.
Again joined by Anni Hogan on keys, and recorded at Berlin’s hallowed andereBaustelle by Boris Wilsdorf, ‘Your Truth is a Lie’ features the addition of vocalist Rosa Anschütz and 8 tracks hewn from sinuous guitars that rattle with skeletal drums. Along with Liam Andrews’ signature bass guitar and Karl O’Connor's knee-knocking rhythms, Wilsdorf’s hands at the studio controls play a major roll in the bristling swagger on display - strings are made textural and the rhythm section unleashed against backdrops of plangent war horns and Anni Hogan’s slivers of noirish piano. Combined, they establish a vertiginous scale and low lumen mise-en-scene where Karl enacts a narrator inside its head, swapping roles with Rosa Anschütz on the bleak romance of a standout ‘Schlag, spiel mir in die Hände’, that feels like stepping around a moonlit no-man’s-land in mauer-era Berlin.
A patiently deferred sense of gratification guides proceedings from the shadow-stepping dabke goth figure of ‘Cut From the Soul’, thru the ominous palpitation and lurching resolution of ‘The Light is Mine’, to the worksite poetry of ‘Let Love Decide’, there Danse Society-styled below-belt hustle of ‘Healing Waters’, and a concentrated, seething gathering of their collective energies in its title song.
