“Ariel” by Wild Arrows is the kind of huge and soaring rock you just don’t hear too much of these days.
How the band managed to obtain such a monstrous sound without a bass guitar is beyond me. It was one of the many things lost in the twelve-hour tide of Hurricane Sandy which also destroyed the band’s studio and their entire full length debut. 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 ideas of the songs were—rather than simply developing riffs, rhythms, melodies and chords.
Based on the organ tinged sound of “Ariel,” I think these band discussions might have centered on the swirling psychedelic influences of the ’60s that have since been filtered into the millennium via Oasis and Brian Jonestown Massacre. Wild Arrows makes a convincing bid for the same sonic territory in their own authentic style with Drummer Shiori Takenoshita, a native of Japan, providing a stunning rhythm track and guitarist and singer Mike Law piercing the mix with his reverb rich vocal.
Though the lyrics often sound like some forlorn plea to the heavens, there is a pervasive uplifting quality to the track that takes hold of the emotions—the palpable feeling of two people making some long-awaited music.
