This Town Needs Guns

New Sound, New Tour: This Town Needs Guns, Black Cat

British band This Town Needs Guns wishes no one asked them about the story behind their name. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that there is no story, says guitarist and lead vocalist Stuart Smith.

“It’s a bit stupid, really,” Smith said. “It was one of those things where it was something that I saw written down, and the friend who showed it to me had said something like, ‘Kids are throwing a brick through the window of a bus,’ and I just thought it was a really stupid thing to write or to have that kind of attitude. … I just sort of thought it was a good band name. And none of the titles of our songs mean anything, either — it’s all just stupid things that we’ve seen or heard and thought, ‘That’s pretty silly, and it just makes us laugh.’”

But goofiness doesn’t define This Town Needs Guns’ sound, which critics have deemed math rock and the group simply describes it as “complicated indie stuff.” Instead, their intricate instrumentation and calculated moves, which they’ll display June 7 at the Black Cat’s backstage, are fueled by a commitment to taking the time to do it right.

Pausing during their work on a follow-up to their 2008 album “Animals” planned for release early next year, Smith and lead guitarist Tim Collis described how a lineup change in 2006 has affected the band’s creative energy and live style.

» EXPRESS: The band got together in 2004, and your members have changed over the years. How has that affected what you guys do?
» SMITH: We’ve had quite a few different lineups — Tim and Chris [Collis] knew each other since Tim was born, because they’re brothers, and that’s the drummer and the guitarist. And I met Tim at university in Oxford in the U.K., and we met Jamie [Cooper], who is our current bass player, just in Oxford, really. Oxford’s really small, so everyone kind of knows each other. So when our last bass player left the band, we all just knew Jamie anyway.
» COLLIS: The music has changed considerably. I think when it first started, when me and Stuart started playing with each other, we didn’t have anything particular in mind — we just started with distorted guitars and stuff. And I guess since Jamie joined our lineup, we had just written the “Animals” album, and so we found our sound, I guess. But it’s probably still changing all the time.

» EXPRESS: In what way has it changed — does it no longer really sound like the “Animals” album?
» SMITH: The sound has developed again, into something else —
» COLLIS: — And it’s been us having Jamie come into the band. This is the first time he’s writing and not just learning someone else’s basslines, so that’s helped.
» SMITH: Before, it was a little bit like a tribute band, and it’s different now.
» COLLIS: There’s more ownership now, and it’s been a big influence.

» EXPRESS: What do you think has caused that sense of ownership? Does your creative process have something to do with it?
» SMITH: I think it’s very much a group process. Generally speaking, we start off with a guitar part that Tim will have written, and from that we try and take a holistic approach and contribute our own parts and see how it goes and see where it’s forming and then just try lots of different things out. … Quite often we’ll start with a riff, and what we develop with that is what we’ll keep.

» EXPRESS: And “Animals” was more rushed than that, right?
» COLLIS: It was all very stripped back and raw and down to the essentials, and it’s not how we would like to do it.
» STUART: I think we’re still really proud of the record and what we were able to achieve, but I think how it differs with what we’re working on now is we have more time and we can experiment a bit more. And hopefully we’re going to be introducing a lot more different instrumentation, and we’re experimenting with like strings and percussion.

» EXPRESS: What are your hopes for the tour?
» COLLIS: We’re hoping some people coming to the shows actually know the tracks, so we’re not playing to people who have never heard of us. We hope there’s like, some people who know of us.
» SMITH: We played our first show [last week], and for quite a few of the songs a lot of people were singing along, and it kind of threw us a little bit — it threw me, anyway. I was really impressed. We’re just hoping to play to people who already have got the record and just hopefully make them happy — and make them stop pestering us on the Internet to come tour over here.

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with Native and Octaves, Mon., June 7, 2010 

Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi
Photo courtesy Sargent House