Kansas City’s Actors&Actresses’ latest, Arrows, is an homage to an overlooked and mostly forgotten genre, a style of music often defined as shoegazer. This swirling mix of post-punk and psychedelia emerged from Europe in the ’90s, flying so low below radar that it went unnoticed by a majority of American audiences...
...It’s easy to get lost listening to Arrows. The band relies on slow tempos and beautiful, somber melodies punctuated by haunting noises and held together by barely there vocals...
...Arrows isn’t really something that can be appreciated piecemeal. Each song on its own would seem lost when taken out of context. That’s not to say there’s a bad track on this album. There isn’t. It’s just a collection better understood in its entirety... ~ Liz Garcia, INK Magazine, June 2009
It's been 3 years since Kansas City's shoegazing 3-piece Actors&Actresses released its first EP, We Love Our Enemy. But after months of hard work the band is nearing the debut of its first full-length album, Arrows. It comes out on June 9th on Ohio label The Mylene Sheath.
Listen to the new album and you can tell it's been painstakingly crafted: The sound is icy, ambient and at times thunderous. It's experimental. Backward sounds laced throughout create an eerie vibe...
~ Sarah Benson, Ink Magazine, April 2009
If Sigur Ros gives us the sounds of glaciers grinding together, what KC's Actors & Actresses - whose moody post-rock is in some ways similar but more direct emotionally and less majestic overall - offer up is more intimate, somewhere between icebergs and ice cubes, the aural equivalent of something hard and frozen bobbing in water warmer than itself.
It's the sound of melting.
The trio's songs start with what seems like chilly restraint, a sound sometimes plodding and distant. But, as the slow riffs repeat, Andrew Schiller's guitar thickens and Scott Bennett's vocals lift into a warm falsetto. Best is the stately psychedelia of "Poverty," a seven-minute grind that seems slight at first but eventually makes you sweat.
For 25 minutes, these four tracks swell and sulk, accumulating power through the band's skillful repetition, each building to climaxes both meditative and muscular, each a mellow roar.
~ Review of We Love Our Enemy EP, Pitch Music, Feb. 06
O'Leaver's, well, you just can't beat it for its low-down, intimate vibe. You never know what you're going to get on any given evening. It could be absolute shit; it could be one of the best performances of the year. Saturday night's show was the latter.
Actors & Actresses, a three-piece that drove up from Kansas City, rifled through an amazing set of gritty, fuzzy, feedback-smeared slow-churners. Shoegazer on steroids. Someone referenced Sigur Rós... This was head-trip music. As one guy said, "I should have taken that acid before the set."
They were the first band in a long time that showed a video during a performance that actually enhanced the experience -- the collection of shots ranged from show-motion explosions to grainy b&w landscapes to atmospheric, decaying set pieces.. Well-edited and always interesting, and a perfect compliment to their sound.
And speaking of sound, the audio level also was perfect -- loud, but not painful. There was no need for earplugs. There also was no escaping its intensity, which is another thing I like about O'Leaver's...There's no place to hide in O'Leaver's. You cannot escape the music, and as a result, you're forced to pay attention...
~ Tim McMahan, Lazy I.com reviewing for the Omaha Reader
We're looking for cover song suggestions, have any?
Talking so far about Grizzly Bear and Broken Social Scene.
Hope you can come May 14th Czar Bar
cheers, Jules
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