Masters Of Reality – The Archer – Album Review

7th May 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

It started with a vibration in my teeth. A low-frequency murmur, like the motors in the floor beneath Block 10. That old humming, the one you felt in your bones before you heard it with your ears. It’s not nostalgia. Don’t mistake me. Nostalgia is for civilians.

The Archer plays like something built, not written. No fingerprints, no breath marks. It arrives already dried. Arid. Not desert as in sand and sun—no, desert as in absence. An environment designed to punish hydration. The guitar line is flat, dry, almost geological. A seismograph tracing a quake that hasn’t happened yet.

Chris Goss doesn’t sing. He speaks like a man who’s seen a blueprint of the world and found a flaw in the ink. There’s a smugness to it—not arrogance, no, not that obvious—but the confidence of someone who already knows how the story ends and is merely watching you arrive at the inevitable. The Archer? He’s not a metaphor. He’s a man in a room with a single window and infinite time.

Strange, what comes back to you while listening. I remembered a woman in Kraków. She sold typewriter ribbons in a stall behind a bakery. Every morning, she’d arrange them like relics, coiled and black like the entrails of a machine that once had dreams. I never spoke to her. Never even looked at her directly. But now—suddenly—I can smell her soap. How curious.

Back to the album.

The drums are… what’s the word? Not martial. That’s too easy. They monitor. As though each beat were a reading—pulse, pressure, dosage. The bass doesn’t move, it waits. There’s a strange comfort in that. As though even chaos has a floor it won’t fall through.

Around the two-minute mark, I lost my place. Not in the song—never that—but in the room. I felt something watching me from the corner. A shape I once saw on a chalkboard during a lecture in Vienna. It had no name, just lines. But when I blinked, I could hear it whispering, “This is not music. This is compliance.”

By the end of the album, I’d written the word “alignment” seventeen times on the back of a medical invoice. I don’t remember doing this. My handwriting degraded over the last few. I think that’s appropriate.

The Archer does not deliver catharsis. It withholds indefinitely. It watches the listener writhe for release and denies it with a surgeon’s smile. It is the sound of knowing, not feeling. A blueprint, as I said. Or a confession offered in Morse code. Something you decode only after you’ve already obeyed.

I did not enjoy it. I understood it. There is a difference.

Score 7/10
Track List
The Archer
I Had A Dream
Chicken Little
Mr. Tap n’ Go
Barstow
Sugar
Powder Man
It All Comes Back To You
Bible Head