Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Boundaries are stifling; they create disorder and chaos in their own particular, demanding, patronising way. Boundaries are the killer of self expression and no matter what the sound of complete structure hammers home into the minds of those who see the auto-tune as a handy guide or instruction to a perfect, yet almost lacking in courage, album; what is needed is articulation without false graces, the slash of the disguised flawless, The Cut of the masquerade and sham from people’s lives.
Inside the lyrical sheets and visual primal screams of instruments being allowed full use of expression and demanding nothing hut an open mind in return; Steve Gullick’s Tenebrous Liar’s new release of The Cut is a unburdening of the soul, a public announcement of discharge and liberation and one that has in its soul a similar stretch of D.N.A. that fans of the late, great Syd Barrett brought to the table before withdrawing from the studio and public life altogether.
There is genius to be found in any art form, it takes patience and understanding to convey what the mind wishes to be known and The Cut is performed in such a way that the distortion of humanity’s effect on the planet, upon each other, is there to provoke and haunt the listener into feeling loss, alienation and the rugged enterprise of improvisation; a musical stream of conscious perhaps but one that is gradually builds the foundations with brutish strength.
Alongside Steve Gullick, Brendan Casey on bass and Ben Edgar on drums add the refinement of acting as the conduit in which the synaptic fires burn. Five years might have proved a distance in time too far between recording, the juices barking, yearning to be set forth and free, but with time comes appreciation, and the psychedelic is to be congratulated as it sits with very generous ideals throughout.
Don’t stop believing, perhaps a phrase overused in the 21st Century, but one that deeply resonates at times when the creative soul is under threat from the brimstone and sulphur of the idiotic and the foolish. In tracks such as Alienation, Words, This Ground, Swing For Me and Forever the freedom sought is valuable and full of meaning,
The Cut, the feel of the blade and the fire that forges it, a jagged edge but one with depth and feeling, an angry retort to the way the world has become a stifled mess, one whose only purpose is to brain washing the population into believing that anything creative is to be shunned.
Ian D. Hall