Liars - Titles With The Word Fountain (TFCF Deluxe Edition) (LP) - Green Vinyl

Liars have always treated the album format like a living thing, bending it, starving it, overfeeding it, then seeing what survives. Titles With The Word Fountain, released by Mute in September 2018 as a companion piece to 2017’s TFCF, is the purest example of that impulse in the Angus Andrew era. It folds you into the same world that birthed TFCF, but shows the seams, the offcuts, the stray sparks. On the TFCF Deluxe Edition it sits as a second disc, like a parallel diary where the crossed out lines tell you as much as the finished poem.

The context matters. By this point Andrew was Liars’ sole constant, and he’d retreated to Australia to write and record, working largely alone in a rural setting. TFCF tilted toward brittle folk textures and sampled debris, an eerie pivot after the neon abrasion of Mess. Titles With The Word Fountain deepens that mood. You hear acoustic guitar snippets looped into uneasy lulls, drum machines that clatter like someone testing them at 2am, breaths and room tone left in on purpose. It is not a pile of B-sides. It’s the kind of shadow record that explains the light.

What makes it stick is how tactile it feels. The arrangements have that Liars knack for turning small sounds into big spaces. A clipped strum becomes a pulse, a whispered harmony becomes architecture. Andrew’s voice drifts between confession and riddle, often tucked into the mix so the syllables act like percussion. You can sense the cut-and-paste process, but it never comes off as clinical. It’s more like watching a painter leave undercoats visible, so the colours hum against each other.

There’s a real Australian-ness to the atmosphere too. Not in any clichéd way, just in the air of it. If you’ve spent time outside the cities, those midsummer evenings where everything crackles and wind pushes dust along the road, you’ll hear that in here. TFCF brought in that bush minimalism. Titles feels like the creek nearby after dark, everything close and a little feral.

The pacing is sly. Some pieces arrive as fragments, under two minutes, and then vanish just as your ear locks in. Others unfurl with a quiet patience that recalls the trance logic of Drum’s Not Dead, yet the instrumentation stays lean. When a beat does thud into place it hits harder for the restraint elsewhere. This contrast is classic Liars, though Andrew’s solo approach gives it a different gravity. You can sense the freedom that comes with working without a committee, but also the loneliness. That tension gives the record its ache.

If you’re someone who filed TFCF under “return to form”, Titles With The Word Fountain will feel like the footnote that became essential reading. Critics generally treated it as a sketchbook companion, which is fair, but the best sketches tell you what the artist kept hidden later. Listening back to back adds heft to both. Tracks on TFCF that felt stark gain context when you hear the experiments surrounding them here. And if you came to Liars through their more dance-damaged work, there’s still plenty to love. The rhythm DNA is intact, just translated into mulch and murmurs.

On vinyl this set makes particular sense. The side breaks introduce their own edits, giving the music little rooms to echo in. The TFCF Deluxe Edition with Titles With The Word Fountain vinyl is a handsome way to live with this era, a document of a band reshaping itself one splinter at a time. If you collect Liars vinyl, you probably already know how well their records reward repeat spins. This one is a slow-burner that sneaks up on you. It also makes a neat entry point for anyone looking to buy Liars records online without hunting down every format. Plenty of Melbourne record store counters have seen debates about which era is best. This pairing ends a few of those arguments.

Liars albums on vinyl have always doubled as artefacts, and this set continues that thread. It captures a moment of transition with unusual clarity, the sound of a musician letting edges show and trusting the ear to follow. If your shelves lean toward restless art rock, oddball folk, or the strange corners where the two meet, this belongs there. And if you’re crate-digging in the world of vinyl records Australia, don’t skip it. Titles With The Word Fountain doesn’t just expand TFCF. It makes it feel inevitable.