Single review: History of Guns – It’s Easy (To Go Blind)

OK, so this is pretty lairy stuff. History of Guns wear their industrial influences on their sleeves, and this alternative take of recent album track “It’s Easy (To Go Blind)” is packed full of crunchy crushed percussion and ring-modulated guitars, simple cycles of sound mutating gradually like a factory gone rogue.

The interesting thing is that while everyone knows what industrial music is supposed to sound like, so few people can actually pull it off. This has led to industrial being more of a flavour than a genre in recent years, with the top spots still held by the bands that put the sound on the map in the first place. History of Guns, however, seem to have the knack of it – the required minimum of melody holding together an assemblage of scrapes, scratches, crashes and smashes, angular and mechanical but somehow shot through with a rat-poison amphetamine groove. “It’s Easy (To Go Blind)” is the sort of track you dance to for three hours and have nightmares about for the following six.

B-side “Exhaust Fumes” reminds me strongly of The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails, albeit more richly imbued with hallucinatory Teutonicisms and hypnotic loops of sound than Reznor’s polished machinery of misery and melody. It’s a very bleak piece of music, this. The exhaust fumes in question would appear to be the ones choking a man sat in a car with a hosepipe running in through the window, and anyone who did the War Poets in secondary school English Lit will cringe at the memories the coughed staccato repetition of the phrase “Gas! Gas! Gas!” produces. And there lies the secret of History of Guns – they’re aware that less is more, and that juxtaposing strong images goes more miles than a hundred gory stories ever will.

However, the drug-mangled Andrew Eldritch-isms of Del Aien’s vocals seem a shade too much to be taken entirely seriously. Perhaps that’s the poor fellow’s natural voice (in which case I guess he ended up in the most appropriate band that he could have done), but considered as an affectation it actually robs the music of some of its power. A straight delivery would be all the more chilling among the sounds of industrial collapse and urban decay, making it less like a badly dubbed manga rehash of Bladerunner… but it kinda grows on you after a few listens. Not in a nice way, though. History of Guns grow on you like mould grows on the last chunk of corned beef in a dead fridge.

That said, compared to most of the tawdry schlock and flavour-of-the-minute pop-punk outfits masquerading as “gothic”, “dark” or “industrial”, History of Guns exude a strong whiff of authenticity – a glowering psychosis that no amount of Hot Topic eyeshadow can imitate, and a genuine ear for the sonically nasty. It’ll be interesting to see how far they can run with it, and I’d like to see them get the chance.