Liars

TFCF

As soon as you get a grip on it, TFCF wriggles into another shape. But even at its weirdest, Angus Andrew’s songwriting couldn’t be clearer, and that’s what makes it a mess worth unravelling.

There is a scatterbrain feel to this record which means rarely does a song scratch the 4-minute surface, making this a relatively light 33 minutes, however, there is something very exciting in hearing Andrew jump about from point to point in such quick succession without losing his overall focus for the record.

‘TFCF’ feels like a greatest hits of all the sounds the band had been honing since the back-end of the ’90s.

Despite the band's downsizing, TFCF demonstrates that Andrew has always been the beating heart of Liars. This time, the unexpected was hearing him bare his without any uncertainty.

Above all, it's TFCF's haunting mood that unites its fragments into something true to the outsider perspective at the heart of all of Liars' music.

It has sufficient new features, sweepingly introduced so as to constitute a more-than-satisfying reinvention. So acoustic instrumentation, something Liars had hitherto generally eschewed, can be found here and found in diverse forms.

TFCF might well be an Angus Andrew solo album under the Liars banner, but what he’s achieved here fits within the his band’s remit for consistently morphing and confounding expectation. More importantly, it’s heartening to see an album as intriguing as this emerge from such a traumatic time.

The Liars’ eight record is another great one, another reinvention, and a great first step for Angus Andrew on his own. Everything is the same, and nothing is the same.

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.

When a band sheds most of its members, keeping the name going can often seem like a hollow exercise in monetary pursuit. With TFCF, the Liars name lives on, and Andrew honors it while also forging new paths.

TFCF is riddled with confusion and self-reflection, and it faithfully continues Liars’ unconventional stride, though this time it had to affect him intimately and personally to take him there.