Actors&Actresses straddle the line between slowcore and the most esoteric shoegaze, their boyish vocals bubbling up from beneath their textural treatises. They’re all glistening, gurgling guitars in no hurry to go anywhere, chiming, knelling, tickling, and floating in equal parts over minimal drums and bass (some of which sounds vaguely, but barely, electronic). If you’re looking for a pop song, you’ve come to the wrong place. But if you’ve come to be gently lifted aloft, levitated by cascading guitars and mysterious moods.Actors&Actresses aren’t just putting on a show of it. They’re immersed, and you will be too.
~Jack Rabid, Big Takeover, Dec. 2009
The songs have layered guitars peppered with ambient sounds that help set the mood with melodic vocals. There’s hints of a shoegaze influence in some of the guitar parts and the songs are equally catchy and soothing at the same time. The music is really quite mellow overall but it’s the intricate song structures that make [Actors&Actresses] stand far above the hundreds of indie rock bands out there today.
.I was surprised by how often I reached for this record in the stack for repeated listens.
.Actors and Actresses turned out to be a wonderful discovery for the label and for myself.
~ MXV, The Punk Vault - November 2009
Almost like ambient rock, shadowy drums press against the elegantly poetic vocals of Scott Bennett who also plays bass. The bleak strains of guitarist Andrew Schiller are often heard intensely twisting against a rigid yet fully capable drum kit masterfully executed and made entrancing by Dave Sumner.
.Huge leaps of artistic sonic undulation make Arrows as multidirectional as its title. The other side of this musically poignant release is that the songs come alive by a sort of rare instrumentation and care in handling that proves itself righteous over and over.
~ Chanda Jones, Short and Sweet NYC, Sept. 2009
[A&A] fill a ton of space for a trio, without ever being even remotely heavy.
.It's like huge, post-metal, but with melodic shoegaze vocals and a couple Valium after all the bong rips - slowed down, but still complex. Something that's usually "crushing" is more like "soothing," with just a few details switched around.
.Overall, it works.
~Stuart Anderson, The New Scheme
These gents are flat spitting out some heart of American goodness in the form of experimental yet retro sound waves. The moment that “Dig to China” starts echoing in, my cerebral cortex immediately flashed the cover of Failure's Fantastic Planet.
~Adam Roncaglione, Rabbit Hole Music and Publications
When you have a nine-track album you trim the fat and do what you must to get the job done.Arrows never self-indulges; never gets too pretentious for its own good. It makes a statement, then moves on to make another. Arrows, even with its faults, is a good album, and certainly a worthy addition to the celebrated Mylene Sheath roster
~ John Spencer, Sun On The Sand, August 2009
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.
~ Liz Garcia, INK Magazine, June 2009
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." ~ Tim McMahan, Lazy I.com reviewing for the Omaha Reader
