Gentle Ghost
Second Arrow
(Self-released, 2015)
Second Arrow is very much a guitar record. That’s no surprise coming from a couple of pedal makers and gear heads (frontman Seth McCarroll and guitarist Brady Smith are the founders of Old Blood Noise Endeavors), but it’s downright possessed by the six string, arms fused and wired to them like the central nervous system, dictating every flinch and flutter the music dares to take. Convulsing, palpitating, it’s a frying pan that hisses at you with every attempt to douse out the heat, the nine tracks’ combined greatest thrills come from reconditioning gale-force riffs into new rock terrain.
There’s a fixation there, yeah, but it’s not a cold and calculated one. And it’s not a restricting one either; primal liberation is central to Second Arrow, a feeling the Norman band’s debut, Family, couldn’t ever capture, which is funny, given that the new entry finds new life by going underground, burrowing into deep, dark cuts of Earth. “Burrow” might not even do justice to the asteroid onslaught “Mountain Mouth” and “Spearherder” summon: You’ll be crawling out of a crater by songs’ end. Resting on the brink of too unrelenting, the album sheds just enough weight to not collapse on itself.
Distinctly darker, Second Arrow commits to the heaviness that Family only started to flirt with. It’s animalistic in its fanged thrash, slotting nicely adjacent to the modern Metz/No Age school of noise rock or the artful emo of Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. The mammoth crest of wooly roars, frenzied scratches, and distant bellows provides the perfect backdrop for McCarroll’s vocals, which whip from deep snarls and aching cries to raspy yelps and yaps, sometimes all in the course of one song (“Flesh Flood”).
With the bulk of Second Arrow‘s offerings clocking in at five minutes and up, some serve to allow the persistent crescendos to unfold nicely (“Bring Me to the End”), while others grow winded carrying that cargo on its back (“Second Wind”). Compositionally strong, the album is well aware of when the water is getting too deep, throwing in elements like guest vocalist Erin Walker’s sweet siren-songs act as a welcome respite in that torrent, which is especially effective in the softly suspended bridge of opener “Mountain Mouth.” Songs like “Dark Parts” and “Print Is Dead” capitalize on punk hooks to cleverly orchestrate pockets of air to gasp up, even if the former leans toward out-of-place — at least in its opening moments. The sneaking, creepy audio loop at the center of sound vignette “Secret Truth” is the most effective at deviating from the mean while succeeding all the same.
“Spearherder” barrels the affair to its end, a fist-clinched, vein-popping jam that has McCarroll, Smith, and the rest of the Gentle Ghost crew (Eric Nauni, Adam and Tyler Huskerson) clicking together in a song that cements the band’s reinvention into tasteful purveyors of new-school art-punk. It’s no wonder that the record found its title in Second Arrow; the first LP wasn’t a miss, but this is their killshot.
