There’s music that you need to be in the mood for to enjoy and the rambling art rock of The Poison Arrows is a case in point. You can’t just drop into their album “Newfound Resolutions” and find that perfect three minute pop song to perk up your mood. The Poison Arrows don’t work like that.
This is very much an urban album that could only be borne of the context of a large city like Chicago. It has the detachment that comes with proximity and, at times, a brooding sense of despair with those sensations being reflected in the rather oblique lyrics – anyone want to take a shot at explaining “awkward silence ends our conversations no patient survives”?
Taking a listen to one of the album’s highlights, “Parting Gifts” throws up curiously familiar synth lines to confuse the drifting vocals just like some European prog-rock band out on a mission to exceed the safe cut limit on a side of vinyl but rambling doesn’t quite describe it as the loops hold together the song with electronic discipline over its five minute plus running time. Similar sonic trickery is used in the more obviously robotic “Inadmissible Architecture” and “Popular Look” although these two tracks give the impression of pastiches of retro dance floor escapades.
Music is an effective means of conveying mood and I’m just not sure what kind of mood that you would have to be in to ingest all of this album – reckon it might be a dark one though - without suffering the aural equivalent of indigestion. There isn’t a song here that wouldn’t have benefited from some editing yet taking their songs beyond a rational sell by date just seems to work. Irrational as that might seem, it is nothing more than the truth.