Garden of Arms

Album Review

The second outing from the duo of Peter Pisano and Brian Moen, better known as Peter Wolf Crier, sounds born of urgency, probably due, in part, to the group’s grueling 2010 tour schedule, which found the pair staging 100 shows in six short months. Icy, melancholy, and jagged, Garden of Arms feels cut from the same cold compress as Radiohead's Amnesiac, trying to squeeze some humanity out of an endless array of snaky guitar licks, blips and bleeps, and processed beats, but with the primal vigor of a band not yet tainted by the machine. Key cuts like “Krishnamurti,” “Settling It Off,” and “Hard Heart” find a successful balance between moody, Berlin-ear Bowie melodies, Black Keys-informed attack and brevity and Dodos-esque experimentalism, and the rest of the album, despite a few detours into semi-indulgent, atonal glitch that shakes the fluidity of the record yet never really derails the train, keeps looking forward, hoping to find a light at the end of the tunnel, while knowing full well that it’s only the first of many.