Guns Are For Kids, Too Much Red Not Enough Red

In an interview I stumbled across the other day, Australian skronk-rockers Guns Are For Kids proudly declared that, “We don’t write chord progressions. We have hooks, but they’re more rhythmic.” Well, yeah — they pretty much nailed that one on the head. Any melodies lurking on Too Much Red Not Enough Red are undoubtedly curled up in a fetal position in a dark corner somewhere, having been beaten senseless by bassist/vocalist Oswald Mainstream’s lurching, staggering low end and Reverend Helix Also’s skittering, threatening drums. Guitarist Ben The Unclear, for his part, scrapes and skirls around up in the ether, playing like he’s wielding a dentist’s drill rather than a six-string. And the combination is something like an updated amalgam of Gang of Four, Essential Logic, and NY No Wave quirkiness; it’s threatening, halfway deconstructed post-punk, and probably a lot more true to its forebears than contemporaries like Liars or The Rapture.

The nice thing about this EP, though, isn’t that it’s noisy or messy — hell, anybody can do that, given the right equipment — but that it loosely harnesses that noise and that messiness in a rhythmic frame that somehow, against pretty much every law of musical physics, holds together. They skirt the edge of total collapse, at times really teetering, but they never completely fall off, not even on tracks like “C’est La Vie,” where the bassline holds things down while the drums slip around jazzily in the background, or “SMS to God ‘Keep Up the Good Work’,” which comes off like a less-anthemic Parts & Labor. All of which shows that A) Guns Are For Kids know their way around their instruments and around song structures, and B) they fully intend for this EP to be a stuttering, scary, apocalyptic, aggro mess of needle-sharp guitars and jazz-influenced rhythms. Put the two together, and the six crawl-inside-your-brain-and-die tracks on Too Much Red Not Enough Red all start to make a frightening sort of sense.