There’s a group of plays, an example being Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’, that are said to have been “written for the study”, meaning that they were designed to be read at home for private edification, rather than put on stage. By analogy, this split EP contains a majority of pieces that seem to have been written as notepads for crazy musical ideas rather than to be listened to by a real, live, breathing (paying?) audience.
Chief offenders are the annoyingly-titled Cats and Cats and Cats , a sort of punk-progressive collective with five regular members and a host of pals making various funny noises. They certainly aren’t safe: the opening, moronically-titled “Brilliant the Brilli Ant “ contains an astonishing number of time and feel changes and the band seem to take pride in piling idea upon idea until the entire edifice collapses into an aesthetic black hole. The beginning guitar stabs suggest a particularly spiky punk anthem, before an almost baroque vocal melody takes over which then subsides into a primary school recorder class. Not sure if I’ve even completely described the first minute yet but it shows that CCC’s musical invention is brimming over. Unfortunately, they do make uncompromisingly ugly music. The vocalist can’t sing, and the speed with which musical ideas are introduced and then tossed away or transmogrified into something unrecognisable suggests a lack of follow-through at best and a lack of interest in songwriting at worst. The lyrics (printed in a glossy but barely legible booklet-why bother if people can’t read it?) are the worst kind of sub-Joycean stream-of-consciousness claptrap and some of them sound like they are products of random computer generation:
“When you were 16 Where you cut ring for cones? Mining for keys? And burning apple cores and semaphore torture and flies while you cry….”
As if the terrible singing and opacity of the music weren’t big enough barriers to comprehension and (say it quietly) enjoyment, lines like these make you want to chuck the thing in a metal grinder and go and lie down in a dark corner. The sadness is that all of the songs have moments of aggressive beauty dotted around, witness the folky melody of “Sweet Drunk Everyone” and the instrumental climax of “Anchoress”. But the final impression is of an orgy of indulgence, a vomitus of undisciplined ideas and in the pissed-up unaccompanied vocal of ‘Tower Tower’ a note of utter contempt for the audience.
Moving to This Town Needs Guns is like moving from a Victorian London smog to the clear air of Lochaber or a Devonian moor at daybreak. Its not that TTNG are models of translucence; it’s just that the Oxford five-piece can write a tune that sails through the dense texture, rather than getting stuck in a wall like the character from that weird French short story.
A prime example is the even-more-annoyingly entitled “24 is Dancier than 6” kicking off with a pistol-shot drum roll and plunging into passionate, large-scale but intricate rock music. The time changes perplexed me but unlike with CCC it didn’t make a big dent in my understanding of what was going on- there was too much that was clearly good. Stuart Smith’s singing is magnificent: bold, sincere, wounded, he occasionally emulates the Longpigs’ Crispian Hunt (praise doesn’t come much higher from me-am I alone in wishing that Richard Hawley would jack in his award-winning but sotto voce solo career and put the band back together?) although his stoic, unflashy, rather matter-of-fact lyrics concerning nights out gone wrong and the ends of affairs are considerably less fiery than Hunt’s raging theological outbursts. Just as good is the interplay between Jody Prewett’s deliberately understated piano runs and Tim Collis’s needling, thrilling guitar. The latter in particular is so unusual that it’s worth acquiring the record just to hear the delicate, brilliant figuration on this song.
Equally compelling but more radio-friendly perhaps is “If I Sit Still maybe I’ll get out of Here , an elegiac, mostly triple-time ballad pitched somewhere between Keane and Longpigs’ “Gangsters”. Notable is Smith’s ability to shoehorn an unruly assembly of words into a first-rate chorus:
“ I know that this time is quite different from when we first met… ….so take hope there’s still enough of what made this young man left This doesn’t look much on the page, but the band’s treatment of such lines shows that there is a big difference between a prize poem and a good lyric.
After these two corkers, the EP ends with a detour into the sort of aggravating experimentalism that made CCC so much hard work. “1470 Man” is little more than a serious of tune-free haikus, while “Don’t Listen to the Hat” seems to be a failed attempt to fuse the lyricism of the earlier songs with near-prose. The result is not very memorable, the words sounding completely disconnected to the music which feels like a not very inspired jam session. The final vocal section is really awful, a plethora of near-inaudible words lost in a blizzard of fuzz. The truth is that TTNG are hopeless experimentalists but can write blindingly good pop tunes. They need to wake up to who they are quick, as This Town Needs Guns, even if they do not need Cats.