"Reasoning with the Guards" (Wild Arrows song)

Wild Arrows’ single “Reasoning with the Guards” is emblematic of the genre blending and warping experiments to be heard on its new album Loving the Void which released on June 17, 2022. There is an edginess to the vocals with male and either female sounds delivering the lyrics in tandem with a touch of desperation. The pace of the song and an underlying use of frequencies give the track an air of unease and tension that isn’t off putting so much as imbues the music with a sense of anticipation that runs the entire run time of four and a half minutes. Guitar and synth lines blare out and warp into different melodic shapes over the insistent beat and the effect is something that feels like chaos and catharsis switching then into passages of introspective transcendence like the lyrics in the song will progress from being in a state of flux and resolve: “I’m not a prisoner or the guard” or “Pursued by the riders, the riders pursue.” And it never fully does yet the song is a thrilling journey through existential uncertainty and identity. The music video rected by Steven Ungureanu shows a figure being confronted by and also confronting shadows in an array of illuminated squares like windows into the possibilities of one’s own soul and suggesting maybe what we think we want is not unlike Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and we confuse our ego driven actions in the moment for the truth of our lives. Maybe that’s not what the video is expressing in creative abstract but when the actions of the figure we see making movement do not directly correlate with the movements of the shadow it’s a subtle effect but one that’s also striking. With the repetition in the lyrics and this visual aspect of the song it seems certain that it is commenting on our habits of mind and our ritualistic behaviors that reinforce what we might think of as our fate and in recognize this we can perhaps break with patterns that no longer serve us well. Heady stuff for a song that sounds like a strange and decidedly not standard experimental post-punk and industrial song but it’s that kind of creative thinking that informs the album as a whole. Watch the video for “Reasoning with the Guards” and follow Wild Arrows at the links below.