It’s most likely you haven’t heard This Town Needs Guns is because of the band’s utterly sadistic delay of releasing their record – getting a hold of this band’s music can be a trying task, especially if you become as entranced with them as I have. This Town Needs Guns is a brilliantly intermixed brand of ‘math’ and indie rock, assembled like a precious gift of Oxford, UK to our ears, which have for so long been in starving need for epiphany-inspiring music. For those of you who know ‘math’ only as an assailing subject in school, let me interject and mention breifly that it is also a rhythmically complex guitar method combining metric inconsistencies, dissonant chords, and angular melodies to create a truly unique and intriguing sound. Rock Sound has recently said of their CD debut, Animals, that these boys , “… take care of the wizardry, combining math-rock time signatures, intricate guitar / bass tapestries and a rip-roaring vocal that swoops above the virtuoso sonics like a musical trapeze artists.” Normally I will seldom bring in a quote from an outside source to describe music, but in this case Rock Sound has hit the nail, full-force and without hesitancy, right on the head.
Active since 2004, This Town Needs Guns is a complete mystery as far as background goes. Nowhere on their official website, Wikipedia page, or MySpace can you find anything about how they met, what brought them together, or their music processes. The members of the band are Stuart Smith, Tim Collis, Jamie Cooper, and Chris Collis and the focal point of their style has been the guitar work of Tim interspersed with highly complex drumming and distributed, melodic bass. Of their musical style, it’s definitely become more technical and the change is evident when comparing their first few musical snacks off Cats and Cats and Cats, with the use of asymmetrical meter signatures and the utter abandonment of distortion and other guitar effects. They are currently signed with four recording companies: Big Scary Monster Records (UK), Sargent House (USA), Rallye (Japan), and Yellow Ghost Records (Australia).
Their full-length album, Animals, has become wildly popular in the UK since the album’s release in October of 2008. Unfortunately for us wayward fans in the US, we’ll have to wait until February to get our hands on Animals. As fully implied by the name, this CD features tracks with animal titles, such as ‘Panda’, ‘Lemur’, ‘Chinchilla’, and ‘Badger’, and all with the similar themes of love, deception, denial, and coming to terms with reality. One track to really get into is ‘Baboon’, which is nearly guaranteed to give you shivers as Stuart Smith, vocals, peaches you of obsessive love and deceit. You owe it to yourself to give this band a listen, or twelve. Check it out at: www.myspace.com/thistownneedsguns
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