Bring Back The Guns
Dry Futures
Feow! Records
By Jose Fritz
It’s been a scensters lifetime since they were called The Groceries back in Houston. These poor, miserable, long-suffering bastards have been recording the same album in one form or another since 2004. In elephants, a full term pregnancy lasts just under two years. It shouldn’t take 4 years for self-aware organisms to make anything; not a patio, not a painting, not an album, not a large mammalian quadruped; nothing.
After 2 years people start to get irritated, biter, and hostile. Bring Back the Guns ran through a series of bassists. Then the hard drive at the recording studio ate the record —twice. Something was awry, something potent like a gypsy curse. Lesser men would have snapped and sent a letter bomb to tech support: instead they persevered. They proved a lot to us all just in the process. It’s often underrated but patience is a weapon.
Before this things had moved along at the normal pace. Matt Brownlie, Blake Powell and company released two albums. They self-released the Knuckleheads & Icons EP in 1999 and a split EP with DrillboxIgnition two years later all without major catastrophe. The split graces my own personal music library in a proud place between Bright Eyes and The Bronx which is oddly appropriate.
Sick of impotent indie labels, and disinterested major labels Brownlie started thinking about starting his own label more formally. He and compadre Jana Hunter from Devendra Banhart founded Feow Records. It was a vanity label of sorts, mostly focused on their own back catalog but also some other projects. In 2007 they released War Elephant by Deer Tick which was quite reputable.
But that magic didn’t trickle down to them. Instead they spent four straight years in studio purgatory. But that anger and volatile resentment was a crucible. They took that old school indie vibe of the Pixies and spot-welded it to the staccato riffing of Blue Tip and the urgency of Cut City. It’s a harsh and unforgiving genre of dance pop that includes Les Savy Fav on one side of the room, and Death From Above 1979 on the other. It leaves room in between for off beat rhythms, unconventional melodies and hooks in the most unexpected places.
The result is a record that’s great in the way that the Minutemen, Fugazi, and Drive like Jehu are great. I hope that the record has landed at the right time and place for them. Time is an unfair and merciless bitch laying waste to ordinary and extraordinary in the same cold-hearted sweep of the scythe. For their own sake I hope their patience pays off.
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