Guns Are For Kids, It Takes a Nation of Morons to Hold Us Back

Post-rock quartet Guns Are For Kids may hail from Sydney, the sunny-side Harbour City of the Land Down Under, but the music on the band’s latest release, the P.E.-ref-ing It Takes a Nation of Morons to Hold Us Back, sounds like it’s just stumbled out of some scary-ass dive on NY’s Lower East Side, pre-cleanup. Or, for that matter, maybe out of some dingy pub in post-industrial Leeds.

Nation of Morons is like some bastard offspring of all that messy, chaotic NY No Wave — James Chance, Swans, Sonic Youth — and Gang of Four’s angular, sharp-edged urban funk. “Cockroach Killer,” in particular, is Gang of Four all the way, with its jerky, stuttering rhythms and oblique, shouted lyrics, while “Thanks For Pissing On Me (I Was On Fire Up There)” starts off with a menacing SY-ish drone and flat, somber vocals before building into full-on anthemic noise-rock a la Parts & Labor. There’s a turbulent, clanking wildness to it all, like the sound of big machinery gone horribly, intelligently wrong.

While I definitely dug the band’s last EP, the scraping, crazed Too Much Red, Not Enough Red, this new release feels a lot more solid. This time out, frontman Oswald Mainstream and drummer Helix Also replaced previous guitarist Ben The Unclear with the much more tightly-wound Audrey L. Carpetbagger (along with bassist Nick Name, who replaced the moved-to-England Reg Artless), and the music’s aided immensely by the increased focus. Where Too Much Red skronked itself into a corner, Nation of Morons comes off as the product of a band that knows what the fuck they’re doing and where they’re going (although going by the band’s own rambling diatribes, they’d probably disagree).

Not that they don’t still cut loose and go berserk, mind you — just skip to “Tropical Worthless,” the last track on the EP, for wild, freaky-ass insanity. But I think Guns Are For Kids do better when focused, laser-like, on…um, whatever the fuck it is they’re yelling about. You got me on that part…