Wild Arrows (LP Release)

Wild Arrows debut album "tell everyone" is a fever dream, sometimes minimalist exercise in despair and doubt presented by contrasting glistening synths and low frequency noise over powerful, methodic drumming. It's a lyrically berating LP you can nod your head to.

From Popmatters:
The trio Wild Arrows describes its history thusly: “Formed in late 2011 out of an idea from 2008, washed away by a hurricane in 2012 and finally to release a full length in 2014.” The emotional circumstances that led to the creation of Tell Everyone, the debut full length by the team of Mike Law and Shiori Takenoshita, are reflected in the music...

Law tells PopMatters about the tragedy that led to the creation of Tell Everyone: “I’m not sure if I will ever be able to think of this album and not think of the way it was recorded, in Brooklyn, at a practice space, at night, in the coldest winter of the last however many years. Seven feet of Hurricane Sandy had ruined every single piece of gear that I owned and it had taken awhile to hobble together enough instruments to start recording again, never mind we dream of going to a proper recording studio. So the pattern emerged of leaving my apartment around midnight to record, about the time the other bands in the practice space went home and it was quiet enough to work. It was usually a brutally cold, strangely quiet, half hour walk to start the recording night and a bright cold walk home that was in retrospect maybe fitting daily book ends for this album. I had wanted it to be vicious, especially lyrically, almost uncomfortable to listen to; I guess Nature was willing to match that sentiment.”

The band began in earnest when drummer Shiori Takenoshita, a native of Japan, joined Mike Law to work on a full length record in July of 2012. A full length album quickly came together and was about to be finalized when Law's recording studio was completely erased by Hurricane Sandy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in gear and build-out was lost by he and his partners, along with the tapes and hard drives for the album, everything gone in a twelve hour tide.

Rather than try to recreate the lost songs Wild Arrows set out to write a totally new album with a laser like focus of vision. Faced with the immediate problem of having no instruments, money to record, or even a place to play, band practices became discussions of how they wanted the songs to sound and what the feelings of the songs were rather than simply developing riffs, rhythms, melodies and chords. Months later when instruments were finally able to be borrowed or bought recording began almost immediately. Set up in a practice space in Brooklyn tracking stretched over nine months of waiting for other bands to go home at night so it would become quiet enough to use the make shift studio. This vampire-like schedule was fraught with limitations of sound and spontaneity that could only be overcome by patience and work... then more work and less sleep. Even so, some limitations forced creative solutions, you will hear no bass guitar on the album since the band wasn't able to buy a bass (though the aforementioned weekly band practices/discussions had planned for that in advance anyway.)

Finally satisfied with their catalog and with the addition of synth player Yasmin Reshamwala the band chose to mix 9 of the 16 songs they tracked to release for its first full length "tell everyone".