Barry Hannah wrote the sort of short stories that took something nearly prosaic and built it into something surreally shattering, brimming with edges of the grotesque, of a distant kind of humor, but always fundamentally human. “Water Liars” was one of those stories, its closing line, 

“We were both crucified by the truth” 

as apt a descriptor of the band formed by Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster and Andrew Bryant.  They  met in the wake of a late-oughts tour, eventually building their first album around a single mic in an oft-fevered Mississippi, Phantom Limb, on a three-day creative bender in 2011. It represented their nascent sound well, the way they brew tunes that build and build – sometimes granting a noisy, anthemic catharsis, and others with a more quiet, barely-stated revelation.

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I have to write about the history of the band because it informs everything that’s come since, the new old record they released in this July heat. The songs that almost never left those darkest roads, almost never saw any light beyond the half-remembered and promised moments of shows almost a lifetime ago. 

After winning the fight to release Phantom Limb on Misra Records (who released Kinkel-Schuster’s Theodore music), Water Liars continued with Wyoming (Fat Possum Records) in 2013, cleaner and sweeter in its way, a long dive into a clear-sprung pond. Wyoming represents a kind of figurative place, the goal for getting-to, an aspirational place you never quite reach. You could call them sad songs, if you wanted, but they’ve always sounded like the sort of truths that accumulate in the veins and arteries of a life, never quite killing, always still moving. Sonically, Wyoming defined the push and pull of the heartbeats Bryant drummed into existence alongside Kinkel-Schuster’s deeply affecting voice; an accurate touchstone would be the songs of Jason Molina filtered through a different lens, a little more punch. Thematically, it was a record about moving on, with all the pains and releases that entails, an almost-prescient thing. 

Then, quickly on its heels, came the eponymous Water Liars in 2014 (also Fat Possum), officially adding GR Robinson to the mix (I think he’d toured and played with them already), and while the themes remain, the sound moved a few steps to something grittier, mostly louder. Kinkel-Schuster continues to tell stories, to travel thoughts down long roads without much end, to explore the surreality of feeling human, all in the contexts of self-exploration, of songs built to a place of revelation. So often, when I listen to Water Liars, I hear plenty more touchstones for comparison – Wilco, Petty, Violent Femmes, Magnolia Electric Co. – but none of those comparisons begin to describe what I hear, what I feel. 

Still, to this day, after a few hard hours and in need of a pick-me-up, I sing, “I want blood / all o’ the time” while slamming my feet on the ground and then switch to the lowdown “heroin shivers” of “Swannanoa” to remind me it’s okay to cry and keep moving on.  That set of complicated emotions, being able to navigate life’s muddiest waters – to experience that whitewater catharsis in a moment and follow it with something crystalline and smooth – defines the music of Water Liars (and I’d say that extends to their solo work). 

I know we’ve been looking all our lives

once you touch your god

it ain’t god anymore

All art is prescient, all prophecies are true. 

In June of 2015, the three of them rolled into Texas at the Echo Lab, navigating impassable, freshly-flooded roads. Stuck in the summer heat without AC, they made it eventually, backtracking and rerouting, finally arriving in the dark of night. 

Then, across 10 days, they put in the hard work of laying down a record, living like a family, feeling at home with each other, the songs.  Bunk beds and pb&j; bb guns, beer cans, and scorpions; crickets and wailing whippoorwills; Matt Pence’s pair of pups named Hoagie and Rufus. 

And every day, across long, happy hours, they made a rock and roll record, eventually carrying it back home to a different kind of flood, a different catastrophe than the one that blocked their road. There would be no rerouting this time, though not for lack of trying. Management folded, attorneys consulted, the record shopped without response, and the inevitable and inescapable tensions overtook the band in Mississippi’s heavy July. 

And so the band, and this newly formed record, ultimately languished, lost to time. 

Until now, in the early July of 2020, nearly 5 years to the date of its recording, released without pomp, press, or really any circumstance beyond some social media mentions from Pete, Andrew, and GR. And a recommendation to play it loud. 

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Play it loud. 

Roll On is a rock and roll record, writ large and as thunderous as a lightning-bright hailstorm, alternating between crashing and calm. Pete, Andrew, and GR all channeled their souls into the songs, and it shows; it’s a quintessentially Water Liars album, but there are elements in these songs that feel like something more than. The way “Another Way To Live” soars, that harmony on the refrain that becomes a shared prayer, a singalong in the pews of right-now-wherever-you-are. And then the prescience of it, with all of them finding another way to keep going, to keep playing, in the face of the band’s collapse. 

Or the loud and proud crash of “More Than Once” that hearkens back to Summerteeth-era Wilco for just a moment before breaking into a different kind of rocker; maybe it’s a love song, too, but my god, “honey, you knocked that outta my head / and I can’t say goodbye more than once” sticks to the bones. 

Like so much of the Water Liars oeuvre – including their extended family releases from both AB and Kinkel-Schuster – a melancholy cloud hangs over much of everything, with little moments of hope and joy like momentary flashes. 

There aren’t anything more than half-answers here, acknowledgments of the terrible, the good. Plenty of small admonitions and little affirmations throughout – “Still I try to prove it to you, I know what I’m doing here / writing on a wall that better men have tried and failed / to make clear” (self-deprecation in the face of doing the work) followed by “So sing, barbarian, while you can”, which sounds more hopeful than it reads. It is no bad thing to be a barbarian. 

Every tune is a standout in its way, but I think my early favorite is the album closer, “Darkest Road”, ending with hissing, squealing feedback, but ineffably and inevitably continuing that Water Liars theme – keep moving, do the work.  

There is sadness in endings, but at least in this one, resurrection was no distant thing. Both Bryant and Kinkel-Schuster have released revelatory records since 2015 (five between them, the most recent Sentimental Noises from AB in May), continuing to share their work, their shared gift for the distillation of complex emotions into something sung and felt. Still ineffable, but tangible. 

Please go buy the record, and then find your way to everything any of them have ever done. 

Water Liars – on Band Camp
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