This Town Needs Guns - Animals (2008)



Yeah, they've already been posted, but look, that was then, this is now. Guess what? Their album is still wonderful, and they made some nice tracks before their album too! consider this a prequel if you will.

They make nice videos
, and they're great live. If you just got paid like I did, you could even buy the album on their bandcamp.

Animals makes most sense to me when I think of the drums and bass as laying out the rhythmic structure. The guitar fits in like a puzzle piece, filling the cracks between the drums, chiming and writhing. I think of them as having macro and micro rhythmic structures. They play in 23 for a while, but they'll subdivide and phrase it different ways, all of which are held together by the soaring vocals, which tie the macro units together with phrasing, lyrics, and excellent melodic sense. In addition, the way the drums phrase the subdivisions masks the prime-number time signatures. The interplay of the guitar and drums (they're brothers) alternates between a game of complex rhythmic counterpoint and powerful moments of unity. Tim Collis has really upped the bar for anyone doing twiddly fingerpicked textures to support vocals, a la victor v and owls/every other joan of arc-pantheon band. His tone is full, bright, and clear, and his repetitive, cascading lines weave an uneasy backdrop for the vocals. The fact that many phrases have an odd number of beats is masked by the consumate melodic quality of the parts, until you start trying to count along and can't. Maybe I'm just trying to say that they make the complex sound simple, one of my favorite feats a band can pull off.

2 Responses so far.

  1. Will says:

    I'm drunk right now so I'm not eloquent right now but (a) this is one of my favorite albums of a few years ago, and (b) I really appreciated your detailed description of what you liked about it. It's great to read people talking at length about this kind of music, instead of just "i liek math this is a good album lmao," so thank you for taking the time to write this.

  2. Ami-Jay says:

    Hello - I only just recently found this blog via a friend, and I decided to take the time to crawl through your extensive catalogue of music and see what you had. Phew, what a journey! I've found some absolutely amazing music here, which is great because I am extremely non-wealthy, shall we say, and yet I have an undying thirst for good music, which this blog has most definitely quenched quite well. The indie stuff I never thought I'd get into, the really heavy punk and sludge I didn't know before, the dreamy ambient... it's all good shit. Really got me into some stuff I had no idea about yet. I was also impressed to see some reletively not-well-known stuff I knew on here, too.

    Thankyou very much for all the music... made these last few days very interesting and I still have tonnes of it to listen to yet. You guys are fucking heros. I shall make a google account soon as I can so I can follow this properly (and of course, when I am able to, I will contribute to the artists monetarily, too).

    (sorry if this isn't precisely the right place to post this form of message, I wasn't sure of another way to let you know)

    And in reference to this album specifically; very interesting. First 3 tracks took me back a bit, by track 3 I thought I had heard the first song 3 times in a row, until I listened back on them and realised they had actually just progressed from one another very subtly and nicely. Highly enjoyed this album, and even though I'm not usually a fan of falsetto singing, I thought the singer's voice was lovely.

    Keep up the amazing work!
    Many thanks.

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