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Tenebrous

-gen- by Gen Williams [Edit this content] ▾ 0 comments 18:18 May 26th, 2006
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Date: 24/05/2006
Price: £5
Info: Fire Records showcase

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His guitar saws back and forth on his knee, glinting with different intensities of reflected red light and emitting a weary, bleary haze of ennui. Remember Slint's 'Good Morning Captain'? Whilst listening to Steve Gullick's new band **Tenebrous, one gets some idea of what the hell happened to the poor, titular seadog's ship. That's not to imply tonight's fare cowers in well-charted post-rock waters; merely that there's the suggestion of the same intent as that song - the sense of haunting, regret, fear, disorientation, edgeless horror. These songs creak like an ageing and crumbling vessel, masts splintered, sails and crew equally tattered and grisly.

At their simplest, Tenebrous offer a dark palette of glowering songs; at their most fractured, they descend into dizzying and stomach-lurching clashes of incompatible melody. Their most direct moment, 'Drinking Man', is chilling, its bluesy squall shaken to arrhythmia and interrupted by rolling, discordant lashes of bass and jaundiced acoustic guitar. It's sonorous but shambolic, the staggering truisms of a wrecked man, sodden with drink and self-loathing. Nick Cave is the clearest influence, but this is no lyrical, balladeering pastiche; Gullick's pitiless growl is lacerated by shaky, jarring waves of melody and corresponding echo. It's shredded but beautiful, a well-formed skeleton slowly robbed by the passing of time of the easy, tactile softness of everything that should cover it.

  • Tenebrous 7 / 10
Tenebrous

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