British rock ‘n’ roll is such a tired idea. Nowadays it represents everything I hate about music; purposely ripped jeans, fashionable mistakes, a worrying sense of repetition and half smoked cigarettes being sucked by the cut lips of a hipster. Eurgh. It has for a long time needed a fresh face, Sound of Guns show all the signs in their Elementary of Youth E.P that they may be that face.
They do it by not resorting to a traditional formula, they replace re-riffs of Oasis with a washed out sense of emotion, pointless arrogance with a deserved swagger and perhaps most crucially they rid themselves of identity, Sound of Guns do not care one jot about who they are when they sing, all they care about is what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.
It would be naive to call them the complete package; yet idiotic to say they’re far off. They seem the confident princes of a new brand of rock n roll, one that comfortably distances itself from the original’s mistakes and in final track “Gallantry” introduce an almost Western grit. Riding towards a gleaming future, past shopping centres and turmoil, the good, the bad and the ugly, Sound of Guns are a new breed of cowboy, a new breed of rock n roll and will be around for a lot longer than the million and four bands who have tried this trick before them. Magic.
