As soon as you play this album, you just know that The Warm Guns possess every Beatles record ever written. Their own album, ‘Blown Away’ contains the kind of upbeat pop psychedelica and ‘socially aware’ lyrics that are rarely produced on these shores anymore. It’s the memory of the original Britpop invasion filtered back through an American West Coast sensibility – shiny guitar stabs and soaring backing vocals singing about time travel and Mao Tse Tung, with a liberal sprinkling of Eastern religious imagery thrown in.
Right from the beginning its hard to escape the Fab Four’s influence – the first verse of the first track ‘The Taosist Wheel’ sounds like Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy’, and ‘What You Need’ is perilously close to ‘Imagine’ with its simple arrangement, piano chords and that nasal vocal, this time supplied by singer/songerwriter Rex Monday.
The lyrics on this album are shot through with hippy philosophies that, occasionally, can grate – It’s only my opinion but I think you have to be a fucking good lyricist to work the number of people killed in concentration camps into a pop song – and I’m not sure it works when the ‘Guns do it, which is a shame because their hearts are definitely in the right place… ‘My Twenties Through Sixties’ (with the lyrics in question) is a chirpy song about imagined alternate histories, while ‘Blown Away’ is about the lack of gun laws in the States.
The Guns really get back on track though with ‘Elephant Pig’. With its ‘Ticket to Ride’ guitar riffs and its Big Beat’ish drum rhythms, it’s so catchy it really doesn’t matter that it’s been done before.
As we hit track eight, ‘Lexa Beaulieu’ the foregrounding of acoustic guitar and scif-idelic lyrics transform Rex Monday into early Bowie, and ‘The Buttercup and the Sugarnation’, ‘Psychos in the Spotlight’ and ‘The Fevered Pitch’ only take us deeper into that territory…but this doesn’t grate, they pull it off because they sound like they’re into what they’re creating here – they sound like people who love their record collections, feed of them and aren’t embarrassed by that. They’re music lovers serenading us with all their little hearts and that’s hard to resist.
If you liked the soaring escape of ‘Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud’ or the spiked hippydom of ‘Strawberry Fields’ you might be interested in ‘Blown Away.
An album of two halves. Fortunately for us, one is ‘Sgt. Pepper’ while the other’s ‘Hunky Dory. ‘