Time Tells No Lies

Time Tells No Lies is the debut Praying Mantis album, released by Arista on 3 April 1981. The band were a four-piece: the founding brothers Tino Troy on guitar and vocals and Chris Troy on bass and vocals, with Steve Carroll on guitar and vocals and Dave Potts on drums. Tim Friese-Greene produced it at Battery Studios in London, with Mike Shipley engineering. Nine songs, about thirty-nine minutes. The opener, "Cheated", entered the UK singles chart dated 31 January 1981 and peaked at 69 across two weeks; the album entered on 11 April and peaked at 60, also for two weeks. The second song, "All Day and All of the Night", is a Kinks cover. Rodney Matthews painted the sleeve. Introducing the 2012 reissue, disk union pointed at that painting and wrote that the wistful melodies the Troy brothers play stand out even among the many bands of the new wave of British heavy metal, singling out the dramatic turns in "Lovers to the Grave" and "Children of the Earth". Those two, along with "Panic in the Streets" and "Flirting with Suicide", are still in the band's set more than forty years later. Contract and management trouble followed, and it took ten years to make another album. Steve Carroll later joined Little Bo Bitch and died in September 2015; announcing it on their own site, the band wrote that his tasteful licks, melodic tones and fine voice had graced this record.