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About Guns

Guns is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Cardiacs. It was released on 21 June 1999 and features the four piece lineup of Tim Smith, Jim Smith, Jon Poole and Bob Leith, following the double album Sing to God four years earlier, with additional vocalists, horn and string players added to the album. It is a rock album which forays into and draws influence from glam rock, post-punk, metal, psychedelic music, folk music, electronic music, Baroque music and reggae. Tim Smith, the band's main creative force, lyrically embraced the poetic effect of the cut-up technique, and the lines of several songs draw heavily on the translation book English as She Is Spoke and the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter.

Overview

Guns is the fifth and most recent studio album by English rock band Cardiacs. It was recorded and mixed at Apollo 8 in London and released in 1999. After a brief period of unavailability, the album was re-pressed in August 2007. Music Compared to other Cardiacs releases, Guns is often considered to be the band's most accessible album. A reviewer for Echoes and Dust describes the album as "Rock’n’Roll with more than a touch of the baroque" and as having "a very intimate feel." The musical style present on Guns has been compared to the music of Spratleys Japs, a side project that features Cardiacs band leader Tim Smith and Guns guest vocalist Joanne Spratley. Despite being considered relatively accessible for Cardiacs, a few tracks on Guns are among the most intricate compositions that the band released. For example, the end of the fifth track, "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)", had Tim Smith using several pieces of paper in order to keep track of his ideas instead of his self-imposed limit of one. According to Tim Smith, "I used to score it all out on reams and reams of paper like a twat, but nowadays I limit myself to one bit of paper just as reminders (as my memory is crap). Although one song on the ‘Guns’ album had me doing the ‘reams and reams of paper’ thing, it had to be done, there was no other way. I sat there for 36 hours solid and didn’t stop until it sort of brought itself to its end and when I looked back at it I wondered where the fuck it had come from because I couldn’t remember doing it." Themes Guns features several of the lyrical themes typical of Cardiacs, including dogs (cover art, tracks 6 and 12) and dirtiness (tracks 7, 8, 9, and 12). In addition, Guns also introduces several new themes that appear throughout the album and in future works. There is a clear fixation on eyes (tracks 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10), with the repeated line "brand them in the eye" present in "Cry Wet Smile Dry" and "Ain't He Messy Though," as well as in later works. Lambs, often "innocent lambs," also make frequent appearances (tracks 3, 7, 8, and 10).

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Notable quotes

“The buffalo hunters and range men have protested against the iron rule of Dodge's peace officers, and nearly every protest has cost human life. ... Most cowboys think it's an infringement on their rights to give up shooting in town, and if it is, it stands, for your six-shooters are no match for Winchesters and buckshot; and Dodge's officers are as game a set of men as ever faced danger.”
— Andy Adams, Log of a Cowboy, (1903); as qtd. in Matt Jancer, “Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West”, Smithsonian, (February 5, 2018).
“To accept the principle that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns.”
— Tommy Douglas, speech delivered at Luther College, Regina, Saskatchewan, March 16, 1973.
“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”
— Hubert Humphrey, “Know Your Lawmakers”, Guns magazine, February 1960, pg. 4.
“As long as I have a pen in my hand and a revolver in my pocket, I fear no one.”
— Benito Mussolini, 1914. Quoted in Paolo Monelli, Mussolini:the intimate life of a demagogue, Vanguard Press, 1954.
“I have a love interest in every one of my films — a gun.”
— Arnold Schwarzenegger, interview with Playboy (January 1988).
“"Games today are very, very real," Zelk says. "It's the weapons; it's the story lines, you know, that people get caught up in — even the optics that are used on the guns, it says L-3 EOTech. It actually has the name of the brand on the side of it so you know which optic, you know, you could go out and buy."”
— Sami Yenigun, “A Real-World Connection Between Video Games And Guns”, All Things Considered, NPR, (April 29, 2013).

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

About Guns

About Guns

Overview

Notable quotes

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Overview

Notable quotes