Truth Be Told

"When I was young, I was diagnosed as a compulsive liar," laughs Sadie Shaw, guitarist for the San Francisco post-punk quintet the Lies, as she admits part of the secret impetus for her band's tricky moniker. Still, she insists that the band members chose the name as a loaded term to reflect the nature of deception, rather than as simple self-incrimination.

As Shaw could attest, prevaricators are clever people. Not simply contrary for the sake of controversy, artistic liars acknowledge truth but distort it by using deliberate words and gestures that could be as convincingly real and honest as facts. True to their name, the Lies transform the detached irony and icy compositions of post-punk into anthems imbued with utter honesty and performed with passionate conviction. This method may make the Lies one of the Bay Area's most deceptively honest groups.

Shaw, along with vocalist (and husband) Dale Shaw and keyboardist Tracy Sawyer (drummer Casey Ward and guitarist Sarah Reed were unavailable), recently took a moment of truth to discuss the significance of the Lies. "One of the biggest goals in the Lies is that the music must have soul," Sadie explained. "I don't care if it's slow or fast -- the music has to hit you in the heart." So, if the members of the Lies claim to bare their souls in the group's heart-wrenching songs, should we believe them? Yes. The Lies' urgent melodies and earnest lyrics march to somber tones like those of Joy Division, Magnetic Fields, and My Dad Is Dead. Yet the anthemic song structures and lush instrumentation on their second full-length album, Resigned -- to be released on May 7 by Kill Rock Stars -- tend toward an unguarded optimism that, ahem, belies the requisite gloom of their genre.

Unlike the more straightforward live feel of the Lies' previous effort, Underdogs and Infidels, their new songs were skeletal compositions before the group entered the studio. Thus, in finishing the album, the band had time to experiment with its structures and sounds, employing various strings, antique keyboards, and effect generators along the way. Its members worked with longtime friend and producer Tim Green (guitarist in the S.F. "instru-metal" trio the Fucking Champs) at his own Louder Studios. Though the multi-instrumentalist group -- Ward also contributed cello and keyboards, and Sawyer added drums and guitar -- may not have the resources to re-create its recordings in a live setting, Sawyer is confident that the Lies will find working arrangements for their shows. "There are some songs on Resigned that we can play live," the keyboardist says, "and some things we can revise to perform."

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Although Sadie, Reed, and Ward had been writing together for a couple of years in an early, unnamed incarnation of the group, the Lies didn't exist until October 1998, when Dale and Sawyer moved to San Francisco (from Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Wash., respectively). Prior to the formation of the Lies, many of the members had worked together in other bands and in other cities, whether sharing common labels or performing on the same stages. Dale and Sadie played with Reed in the Olympia garage punk group the Bonnot Gang. Keyboardist Sawyer battered the drums in the influential Olympia riot-grrl duo Heavens to Betsy, with future Sleater-Kinney vocalist/guitarist Corin Tucker. Drummer Ward played keyboards in the short-lived but legendary San Francisco black metal band Weakling.

The melodic symmetry of the Lies' songwriting -- wherein multiple instruments play equal parts of the overall melody, without a particular musician dominating the tune -- powerfully accentuates the subtleties within the layers of sound. While a particular song may include a melodic theme -- as in "Accident and Emergency" and "Cosmetic" -- each instrument feeds into the melody as a piece of a whole overture. "Musically, the one thing that makes us significant is that no single person is at the forefront," Sadie explains. "We always try to make everything layered and equal, so that everyone is going off at different points. The vocals work with the music because they're not right at the front; they work with the melodies." Dale chimes in wryly, "It's very socialist."

The nursery-rhyme melody of "Accident and Emergency" opens Resigned with a nod to the plodding strain of Joy Division's "Atmosphere," replete with analog synthesizers shadowing the vocal melody. Dale sings harmoniously between a low-register chant and a yearning wail: "Safety and silence/ I want it all." Likewise, "Sight and Sound" recalls the threadbare delivery of Joy Division's tragic vocalist, Ian Curtis, as Dale sings a slightly revised version of the refrain "They keep calling me" from that band's "Dead Souls." But where Joy Division's songs evoked fatalism in their lyrics and haphazard mix of instruments, the Lies seem almost optimistic beneath suffocating layers of antique synthesizers and strings. While the band's songs are undeniably melancholic, Dale's lyrics never stoop to dour nihilism, nor does the music rely on dirges.