This Town Needs Guns - Animals

by Tom Mendelsohn

This review needs a better epithet

"To give amateurs an idea, they’re in the same brains-on-sleeves mould as the aforementioned Foals."

Before we get any further, it should be noted that This Town Needs Guns is a band from Oxford, with all that entails. To warn you, they’re defiantly math rock, and while ‘unfathomable’ is too harsh a word for them, perhaps, they do bear all the hallmarks of most of their local peers. This means intricacy in place of accessibility, as well as all kinds of wilful obtuseness and for-the-sake-of-it complexity. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable in its wizened little way, it’s just not ever remotely going to achieve much popularity.

The band have been Oxford mainstays for years – grubby arrivistes Foals turned up to steal their melodious thunder by popping themselves up to the eye teeth – and they’re quite well respected by the city’s chin-stroking scene. They also, we think, begat the world’s ace-est existential posh speaker-songwriter George Pringle, which makes them cool guys in our eyes for ever.

With guitar licks cantering every which way, tight but skittish drumming and a very clean sound, the band is obviously in thrall to American indie legends like Owls and Don Cabellero and other bands we haven’t heard of. To give amateurs an idea, they’re in the same brains-on-sleeves mould as the aforementioned Foals, using the same basic template to make music, but TTNG are much more inscrutable and perplexing, like a math-rock yin-yang. Each has merits.

You could easily get away with criticising this record for its relentlessness – the guitar fripperies don’t let up – but a few listens gets one into the spirit of things, and it’s actually quite easy on the ear. We don’t find a lot of personality in Stuart Smith’s voice, but it’s in tune and on-tradition, and doesn’t detract. Cutely [or nauseatingly], they’ve named every song after a different type of animal, which is something that pretentious bands do, but they are from Oxford after all.

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