If ever I wanted music to encapsulate raw pain and anguish in such agonising detail and with such empathy, then this has to be it. Arrowhead is familiar Prurient/Dominick Fernow territory of emotions stripped bare and the ugly underside of the human condition, all delineated through his use of tortured circuits and fried electronics.
This particularly applies to the first track, “Sternum,” a stripped down nerve-shredding 12–minute dive into the night-black depths. Simply composed of squealing and humming electronics (but set at a low volume), sparse percussion and vocals that bleed anguish, it nevertheless touches nerves with its unaffected directness. The simple lyrical refrain of ‘I want to die with you’ does an effective job of exposing the horror of a personal hell of frustration and despair. Inwardly spiralling psychoses and mental phantasms assail from all sides, and whatever sliver of sanity or normality was there is finally eroded away. The deterioration and degradation is palpable. This is emotional despair and a mind at the end of its tether at its absolute rawest. Combined with that insistent insectoid squeal it drills itself right into the brain and sets the teeth on edge.
If “Sternum” is pain and anguish, then “Ribcage,” the second track, is about the aftermath, the eventual mental dissolution and destruction: a cacophonic maelstrom of screeching electronics and feedback, interspersed with screams; the swirling chaotic randomness portrays a mind breaking down into incoherent atomisation. This is what it must feel like to descend into the depths of the long night of the soul, or to stand on the threshold between safety on the one side and a bottomless chasm on the other. There comes a point where the track quietens down a degree or two, a place perhaps where that threshold exists, and one almost gets the feeling that all is not quite lost here. Any such illusion is soon shattered, as the track once more breaks out into a storm of noisiness. The only way is down into the illimitable and lightless subterranean depths.
The last track, “Lungs,” is a bit of a departure from the other two pieces, principally because it introduces the notion of rhythm. Rhythm is all the more surprising because of its complete absence anywhere else on here. However, extending what I have said above, I guess it makes a species of sense in its own way. I can imagine, after having plumbed the utmost deeps and having reached a kind of equilibrium, that the mind gets wrapped up in a mental inferno of its own making. Carpeting the primitive tribal rhythm is a thick layer of granular sheeting which is entirely descriptive of the furnace roar. Indeed, a self-created (and self-perpetuated) hellish purgatory.
Noise and power electronics only hold my attention if the artist has an approach that takes him/her off the well-trodden path. Fernow, while using the tools and palette of the genre, manages somehow to at least bend the material to do his bidding, and to attempt to say something new. For the most part I feel he amply succeeds, and listening to this was a welcome change to the Spinal Tap-style ‘turn everything to 11 and record what comes out the other end’ typical of the genre. In the course of writing about Arrowhead I must have heard it about a half-dozen times, and in every instance there was some new subtlety that revealed itself. Prurient is definitely one of the more creative of noise musicians, unwilling to blindly tread the same path as others do. On this example at least Fernow shows what can actually be done with noise, with a little thought and some creativity and talent.
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