Wild Arrows – Queen City Sounds and Art

“Last Day of Summer” is Wild Arrows’ Melancholic, Feel Good, Existential Heartbreak Synthpop Song of the Season

“Last Day of Summer” finds Wild Arrows in an especially melancholic mood. The image of what is presumably singer Mike Law’s face rippling at the bottom of a pool is a great visual for the lyric video. It casts the singer in a mood of deep repose and flooded with feeling. The song is like dream pop steeped in the emotional colorings of one of those great songs from the earlier John Hughes movies or more recent teen comedies with the more hip soundtracks with a particularly poignant song in a key moment of the film. Its drifting glittery guitar riffs and shifting synth washes and steady beat hit immediately with the sound of a classic. But this is no song about the heartbreak of youthful romance or that of an older person looking back farming nostalgia for inspiration. The lyrics to this song is certainly about heartbreak but one more existential and the kind that strikes you so deep when hard realizations crash into your brain and sink your heart in a way that simple breakup can accomplish. It’s the kind of song that sounds like it came about after a major and acute existential crisis struck and this warm and bright song was the way to dilute that pain in something poetic meaningful after sitting with it for several moments. An adult with the capacity to still feel knows these moments where something will stagger you, a soul deep disappointment that can be triggered by a specific event or unexpected conflict with a loved one but often experiences that point to you knowing deep down that things can never be the same again and that the circumstances that you had perhaps been counting on and even depending on for years have dissolved or are rapidly doing so. And when that happens at a point in life that feels like a time of natural transitions in the past it can sink your spirits. But in writing this song in this tone of resigned and melancholic acceptance Wild Arrows it seems as though the band is showing how you can get through those rough emotional patches if you just feel it and live in and pick yourself up again and try to reinvent aspects of your life once again. Watch the video for “Last Day of Summer” on YouTube and follow Wild Arrows at the links below. The band’s new EP Rejection Bloom EP dropped on October 20, 2023.

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Wild Arrows’ “Reasoning with the Guards” Bursts Darkwave Tropes and Encourages a Deprogramming of Deeply Ingrained, Ritualistic Habits of Mind

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.

Wild Arrows Eases Wounded Emotional Confusion to Warm, Celebratory Acceptance in the Hazy Ambient Pop of “Here’s the Ghost”

Wild Arrows is a band headed by Mike Law of posthardcore bands EUCLID and New Idea Society but don’t expect that style of music on its new album Loving the Void. The single “Here’s the Ghost” exemplifies the fusion of musical ideas and palette of sounds. It begins as an almost ambient, synth pop meditation on being stuck in a feeling and the repetition of the line “So what if I still love you” the way you can get trapped in your head and the recursive loop of an internal narrative that probably serves to salve your wounded feelings but can be counterproductive in re-establishing psychological health. But halfway through the song the energy shifts and the words to “I only wanted to be with you in a way that you were all your own so here’s the ghost.” It’s a flipping of perspective from an aggrieved self-focus born of hurt to one of coming to terms with the break-up and maybe beginning to see a way clear of the unhealthy aspects of the relationship. The sudden yet somehow subtle shift of pace and tone around the 3:20 mark is an interesting way to show how your psychological orientation toward anything can change without having to lose anything. The uplifting sweep of the song out of a dreamlike melancholia is a dramatic evolution worthy of Mercury Rev. The whole album feels like a tapping into the emotional territory of Law’s other projects but through the lens of early OMD and that unlikely alchemy makes for a collection of fascinating and emotionally vibrant music. Listen to “Here’s the Ghost” on YouTube and follow Wild Arrows at the links below.