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.
The album's title and its kitsch cover of a stormy sky with two mirror image floating, grinning dog heads both play into the Dada-esque love of absurdity from Smith. It was supported by two singles, "Sleep All Eyes Open" and "Signs". Since its release, writers have considered Guns one of the band's more accessible albums, and have compared it with Sing to God regarding the albums' tones, lyrical content, coherence, fan reception and impact. Guns had been Cardiacs' most recent album for 26 years, and was thought to be their final studio album, until the release of the long-planned follow-up album LSD in 2025.
Background and recording
From the 1980s through to the mid-1990s, Cardiacs were a six-piece featuring Tim Quy (percussion), Sarah Smith (saxophone), and William Drake (keyboards). The band's lineup drifted apart around the release of their second album On Land and in the Sea (1989), and after a transitional phase, Cardiacs, having always had a revolving door policy on band members, had coalesced into a four piece by the time of Guns which cohered around Cardiacs' main creative force Tim Smith and his brother Jim Smith on bass, alongside "Random" Jon Poole (guitars) and Bob Leith (drums). They had released the double album Sing to God four years earlier, which for many was the strongest entry in the band's canon, quashing doubts that the band could create the same mayhem with fewer people. As the bar had been raised, expectations were high for Guns.
Guns was recorded and mixed at Apollo 8 in London, England, marking a re-establishment of the creative team of Tim Smith and Poole, as well as Leith for some of the album's lyrics. Additional vocals were added to Guns from Tim's ex-wife Sarah Smith, alongside Jo Spratley and Sharron Saddington, later known as Sharron Fortnam. Marco Sgrignoli of the Italian publication Ondarock commented that the female vocalists' "significant and distinct contribution" on several tracks was "quite unheard of". Horns and strings were contributed by Rob Deschamps, Chris Brierly, Catherine Morgan and Mark Pharaoh. Though Tim enjoyed working with a co-pilot, he was driven enough to complete Guns largely on his own. Jim retrospectively remarked, "Tim was a bit secretive sometimes, as he was recording Guns. That just came at us with a 'here you are, it's done' kind of thing. We were like 'what?'".
Music and themes Both Sing to God and Guns display the band's harder edged, metal-leaning sound which they had retained since slimming to a four piece on 1992's Heaven Born and Ever Bright. The reviewer Stuart Benjamin of Echoes and Dust described the album as "Rock 'n' Roll with more than a touch of the baroque". According to The Quietus writer Sean Kitching, Tim Smith moved away from his core 60s British pop influences when recording Guns, due to their increasing Britpop-derived ubiquity when the scene began to emerge, and more glam rock nuances began to come to the fore on tracks such as "Spell with a Shell". Sgrignoli described Guns as a return to the band's post-punk impetuosity, maintainging the Beatlesque flair that dominated Sing to God, and the passion for contortions and stylistic blends. He suggests that the stylistic variety of Guns highlights an aspect of Cardiacs that commentators have emphasized since the first albums: the "overflowing Englishness" of the Cardiacs formula, including the "fundamental" ingredients of late beat pop, the sound of two-tone, 1977 punk and progressive rock, which have an "inescapably British connotation".
The album's production is layered, featuring keyboards which "loop throughout the mix" and vocals that "come and go". Sgrignoli described the album's keyboards as "tasteless", but "fortunately flanked by some more convincing electronic forays". The writer Eric Benac noted that Tim Smith tried "a few new contemporary tricks, such as the droning sound of shoegaze and the extreme dynamics of the Pixies" and took them "to a new level by utilising his superior songwriting skills to create an ever-shifting collage of sounds that still remain pop songs". Sgrignoli commented that Saddington's balanced timbre on "Wind And Rains Is Cold", "Clean That Evil Mouth Out Your Soul" and "Will Bleed Amen" contrasted with Smith's usual "moan" and resulted in "unexpected and reassuring openness". According to Benac, Cardiacs feel "closer to the psychedelic label Tim approved of" on Guns, with "each song possessing a warmth that the often harsh Sing to God tones did not". According to Sgrignoli, Guns is considered one of the group's most accessible albums, with Benac calling it "fairly straightforward" compared to its predecessor.
Benjamin suggests that the difference between Guns and the other Cardiacs albums is that Guns has the band's musical influences "well to the fore", with the addition of "a large wall-of-sound glam-rock influence which makes the record extremely accessible, musically." He suggested that pointers to the sound of Guns are in the band Spratley's Japs, which hailed from the New Forest and featured Tim Smith and Jo Spratley. Their album Pony, which was recorded in 1998 and released in 1999, the same year as Guns, "shares much of the DNA of Guns" and "has a very intimate feel" that "seems to have been carried over into the Guns sessions", with Tim having had a large hand in the writing and production of Pony. Uncut commented that Guns became Cardiacs' "most intimate album yet" and called it "one of Cardiacs' most heart-rending collections of songs, with a deep melancholic undertow".
Lyrically, Tim Smith embraces the cut-and-paste approach that he had occasionally toyed with, according to Benac, with all the songs on Guns featuring "strange word combinations and a sense of Burroughs-ian randomness", though retaining "an atmosphere unique to" each one. Guns features several of the lyrical themes typical of Cardiacs, including dogs and dirtiness. Another theme common throughout the album is transformation, such as the snail in "Spell With a Shell" growing wings. Benjamin said that "lyrically, Guns is as dense, wilfully confusing, and obscure as Sing to God or any other Cardiacs recording. As Tim's querulous voice squawks and shrieks through each number, the songs unfold like puzzles, offering no answers or points of navigation for those who journey with them. Perhaps the biggest puzzle is how they shoehorn those ungainly sentences and verses to fit the meter of the music, but somehow they always do."
Side one The album opener, "Spell with a Shell", is psychedelic in texture and tone, with Benjamin describing it as "a glam-rock Bolan-esque stomp". The song mainly focuses musically on keyboard loops with a "steady drum pound" from Leith, and centres around a "one-note bass thud", while female singers make an appearance. The chorus has a dynamic shift, with the introduction of guitars and a "tricky chord progression playing out over layered voices". An extended second verse, the female chorus, and "backward keyboard lines" emphasise a feeling of tension, with the song's ending coming "abruptly on a hammered guitar line". The song's implicitly violent lyrics are of a visiting snail named by the uncertain singer and threatened for growing wings, being personally controlled in their relationship, punished and burned when the snail does not do well. In a 2021 buyer's guide to Cardiacs' albums, Dom Lawson of Classic Rock called "Spell with a Shell" "without doubt the finest song about a snail ever written". Benac noted that "Spell with a Shell" sketches out some of the album's musical themes and lyrical concepts, calling it "a somewhat strange way to start the album" but "appropriately odd".
Benac opined that the influence from the Pixies was most obvious on "There's Good Cud", which begins with a loudly-mixed sliding guitar noise that shifts into an acoustic rhythm. A distorted guitar enters between each line of the lyrics, creating a dynamic shifting sound, and the chorus "pushes into electric guitars and pummeling drum rhythms", instrumentation which is maintained as the second verse increases the song's intensity and the drums increase in pace. Another dynamic shift, in a type of mini-climax common throughout the album, contains a sustained guitar solo before "a few moments of stop-and-start", with the third verse following the same structure as the first but only featuring bass and drums in the between-line music. Lyrically, Bennac suggests that the song's perspective causes an uncertain tone similar to that of the unreliable narrator in novels or short stories, and that "good cud" perhaps "exists as a platonic ideal of itself". He questions if the line "I'm a sister's boy" is a reference to incest or a mere play on words on being a "mother's boy". Lawson compared the sound of "There's Good Cud" to "a bomb going off in a clown-shoe factory", and Benjamin called it "an electric, shouty sing-along".
Lawson said that on "Wind and Rains Is Cold", Tim Smith mastered reggae. Benjamin said that it "manages, against all odds to merge ska with something approaching a medieval plainsong", and Sgrignoli called the track's "ska flourishes" a recurring element associated with Cardiacs. Leith's rhythm is mixed loud and bass is limited to one note per bar. A gentler track, Benac opined that Smith placed "Wind and Rains Is Cold" in a "perfect position to ease the tension" after the first two "frantic" ones. Lyrically, the song contains religious references and violence, with an army dashing and calling out alarms. Benac describes Tim Smith's vocal as "laid back", and Sarah's as shifting to Sea Nymphs territory with gentler music as she "beautifully" describes hair waving in the wind as being like "meadow grass under the flood". Sarah leads the song's vocal over organ chords with a "soaring sound emphasizing the album's spacey feel", with the chorus bringing a morbid "dark and brooding mood" with England-appropriate weather. The shorter verse describes somebody "a quivering" with cleanliness, while Benac suggests that Sarah's pre-chorus could show the cleanly person being turned dirty with hate and fear. Many of the lyric lines of "Wind and Rains Is Cold" and later on side two "Clean That Evil Mud Out Your Soul" come from the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter. In particular, the film inspired the line "Hide your hair, it's waving all lazy and soft like meadow grass under the flood".