Eros (Regis & Friends) Your Truth Is A Lie

Industrial masterminds Boris Wilsdorf (Einstürzende Neubauten), Karl O’Connor (Regis), and Liam Andrews (My Disco) saddle up for a starker, sexier, and expansive debut album proper of spectral goth swagger as Eros, 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 Wilsdorf, ‘Your Truth is a Lie’ is distinguished from the debut Eros mini-LP (’A Southern Code’ 2022) by the addition of vocalist Rosa Anschütz, and running nearly twice as long, giving fans of the trio something to get their fangs right into, and the time to do it. The album's 8 tracks are hewn from sinuous guitars and rattle with skeletal drums, rent in a resounding environment where listeners are encouraged to operate, prone and agog, on sixth, proprioceptive, senses, to best receive Eros’ arcane sacrament.

The notion of studio-as-instrument is key to Eros’ appeal, and in Boris Wilsdorf’s hands, Berlin’s enviably well stocked andereBaustelle studio is equally credited along with Liam Andrews’ signature bass guitar and O’Connor's knee-knocking rhythms. Strings are made textural and the rhythm section unleashed wraithlike 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.