The Silver Arrow Collective just dropped a nine-track rocket sled built from pedal steel, existential grit, and the kind of guitars that smolder long after the needle lifts. Forget what you think “alt-country” is—“The Silver Arrow Collective” takes that label, chews it up, and spits it out as something sleeker, wilder, and pointed straight at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll.
The engine room of this operation is frontman Andy Barbour, a guy who traffics in “mystic restlessness.” Hell yeah, he does. His voice is the star of this show, a ragged, beautiful instrument that carries “the grit of old highway signage.” He’s not just singing these songs; he’s testifying, howling dispatches from a road trip that went off-map after midnight. But he’s not alone. Enter Davey Horne, the secret weapon and co-vocalist. On tracks like “Silver Wing” and the epic closer “Give Everyone Our Fondest Farewell,” Together, they don’t just sound good—they sound important, evoking the ghost-of-a-whisper legacy of bands like The Jayhawks and My Morning Jacket not as copycats, but as brothers-in-arms on the same dusty, expansive highway.
This is a collective in the truest sense, a gang locked in to serve the song. The music sprawls and soars, with pedal steel and piano runs that feel beamed in from a 3 AM jam in a Laurel Canyon attic, while guitar lines shimmer and dissolve just before you can fully grasp them.
Massive credit for that sound goes to producer Adam P. Gorman, who manned the boards at Manchester’s Pinhold Sound. He captured the perfect balance here: the open-hearted, raw nerve of Neil Young, but doused in something expansive and subtly psychedelic. The production isn’t slick; it’s alive. You can almost smell the tube amps overheating. Gorman produced the majority of the tracks, with Garry Boyle stepping in on the haunting “Almond River” and Davey Horne himself taking the producer’s chair for the unnerving pulse of “Trip to the Sound,” a track he co-wrote with Kirsten Adamson.
And the songs? Man, the songs. They seep into your bones. It kicks off with the stark, prophetic warning of “Dark Times Are Coming” and takes you through the fever-dream psychedelia of “Electric Sea / Electric Sky“—a track that absolutely ripples with energy. There’s the dirge-dream state of “Winter” and the final, almost elegiac farewell of the closing track. This is music that understands its roots not as a museum exhibit, but as a living, breathing, unpredictable force. It’s folk rock, it’s psych rock, it’s something darker lurking underneath. Genre is irrelevant.
The Silver Arrow Collective isn’t interested in tidy definitions. They’re interested in the journey, in getting “somewhere stranger.” So, do yourself a favour: grab this record, drop the needle, and let them invite you along for the drive. Just be ready for where it might take you.
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