Guns is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Cardiacs.[c] It was recorded and mixed at Apollo 8 in London and released on 21 June 1999. Guns was recorded by the four piece lineup of Cardiacs' main creative force Tim Smith, Jon Poole (guitars), Bob Leith (drums) and Jim Smith (bass), following the double album Sing to God four years earlier, with additional vocalists, horn and string players added to the album.
The album's kitsch cover of a stormy sky with two mirror image floating, grinning dog heads, and its title both play into the Dada-esque love of absurdity from Tim Smith. The album was supported by two singles, "Sleep All Eyes Open" and "Signs".
Guns had been Cardiacs' most recent album for 26 years, and was throught to be their final studio album, until the release of the long-planned follow-up album LSD in 2025.
Background and recording
Band photo of Cardiacs, c.1999
From the 1980s through to the mid-1990s, Cardiacs were a six-piece featuring Tim Quy (percussion), Sarah Smith (saxophone), and William Drake (keyboards). Cardiacs, having always had a revolving door policy on band members, had coalesced into a four piece by the time of Guns. Alongside Cardiacs' main creative force[9]Tim Smith were "Random" Jon Poole (guitars), Bob Leith (drums) and Jim Smith (bass), who had released the double albumSing to God four years ealier, which for many was the strongest entry in the band’s canon, quashing doubts that the band could create the same mayhem with less people.[10] As the bar had been raised, expectations were high for Guns.[10]
Additional vocals were added to Guns from Tim’s ex-wife Sarah Smith, alongside Jo Spratley and Sharron Saddington. Horns and strings were contributed by Rob Deschamps, Chris Brierly, Catherine Morgan and Mark Pharaoh.[10]
Music
The reviewer Stuart Benjamin of Echoes and Dust described the album as "Rock 'n' Roll with more than a touch of the baroque".[10] According to The Quietus writer Sean Kitching, Tim Smith moved away from his core 60s British pop influences when recording Guns, due to their increasing Britpop-derived ubiquity when the scene began to emerge,[9] and more glam rock nuances began to come to the fore on tracks such as "Spell with a Shell".[8] Marco Sgrignoli of the Italian publication Ondarock described Guns as a return to the band's post-punk impetuosity, maintainging the Beatlesque flair that dominated Sing to God, and the passion for contortions and stylistic blends.[11] Benjamin suggests that the difference between Guns and the other Cardiacs albums is that Guns has the band's musical influences "well to the fore", with the addition of "a large wall-of-sound glam-rock influence which makes the record extremely accessible, musically."[10] He suggested that pointers to the sound of Guns are in the band Spratley's Japs, which hailed from the New Forest and featured Tim Smith and Jo Spratley. Their album Pony, which was recorded in 1998 and released in 1999, the same year as Guns, "shares much of the DNA of Guns" and "has a very intimate feel" that "seems to have been carried over into the Guns sessions", with Tim having had a large hand in the writing and production of Pony.[10]
The album's production is layered, featuring keyboards which "loop throughout the mix" and vocals that "come and go".[12] The writer Eric Benac noted that Tim Smith tried "a few new contemporary tricks, such as the droning sound of shoegaze and the extreme dynamics of the Pixies" and took them "to a new level by utilising his superior songwriting skills to create an ever-shifting collage of sounds that still remain pop songs".[12] According to the writer Benac, Cardiacs feel "closer to the psychedelic label Tim approved of" on Guns, with "each song possessing a warmth that the often harsh Sing to God tones did not".[12] According to Sgrignoli, Guns is considered one of the group's most accessible albums,[11] with Benac calling it "fairly straightforward" compared to its predecessor.[13]
Themes
Lyrically, Tim Smith embraces the cut-and-paste approach that he had occasionally toyed with, according to Benac, with all the songs on Guns featuring "strange word combinations and a sense of Burroughs-ian randomness", though retaining "an atmosphere unique to" each one.[13]Guns features several of the lyrical themes typical of Cardiacs, including dogs (cover art, tracks 6 and 12) and dirtiness (tracks 7, 8, 9, and 12).[10] Another theme common throughout the album is transformation, such as the snail in "Spell With a Shell" growing wings.[13] Benjamin said that "lyrically, Guns is as dense, wilfully confusing, and obscure as Sing to God or any other Cardiacs recording. As Tim’s querulous voice squawks and shrieks through each number, the songs unfold like puzzles, offering no answers or points of navigation for those who journey with them. Perhaps the biggest puzzle is how they shoehorn those ungainly sentences and verses to fit the meter of the music, but somehow they always do."[10] One known source is the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, which provides seemingly all of "Clean That Evil Mud out Your Soul" including the song's title; its chorus, for example, uses "Merciful heaven only knows what unholy sights and sounds all we innocent babes has made in them dens," adapted from "Oh, heaven only knows what unholy sights and sounds them innocent babes has heard in the dens of perdition where she dragged 'em." Several lines from "Wind and Rains Is Cold," including the song's title, also originate from the film. For example, the line "Hide your hair it's waving all lazy and soft like meadow grass under the flood" is adapted from the line "With her hair wavin' soft and lazy like meadow grass under flood water." Cardiacs references to The Night of the Hunter are not unique to this album; notably, the cover from their previous album, Sing to God, also takes inspiration from the film.[14] At the end of the lyrics for "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)", the author effectively thanks the listener for sticking with the song.[15]
Another notable lyrical source is the celebrated Portuguese to English phrasebook English as She Is Spoke, which is well-known for its inaccurate and often humorous attempts at translation. "Cry Wet Smile Dry" borrows heavily from the "Familiar Dialogues" section of the book, featuring direct quotes from the subsections "For make a visit in the morning," "For to see the town," and especially from "For to write." The song "Sleep All Eyes Open" uses quotes from the subsections "For make a visit in the morning" and "The weather," but also borrows several lines from the "Familiar phrases" section, including the lines "You mistake you-self heavily" and "That may dead if I lie you."[16]English as She Is Spoke is a lyrical source shared by Pony, an album released the same year as Guns by Cardiacs side project Spratleys Japs.
Songs
The album opener,[17] "Spell with a Shell", is psychedelic in texture and tone,[13] with Benjamin describing it as "a glam-rock Bolan-esque stomp".[10] The song mainly focuses musically on keyboard loops with a "steady drum pound" from Leith, and centres around a "one-note bass thud", while female singers make an appearance.[13] The chorus has a dynamic shift, with the introduction of guitars and a "tricky chord progression playing out over layered voices". An extended second verse, the female chorus, and "backward keyboard lines" emphsise a feeling of tension, with the song's ending coming "abruptly on a hammered guitar line".[13] The "Tim-like" lyrics are of a visiting snail named by the uncertain singer and threatened for growing wings, being personally controlled in their relationship, punished and burned when when the snail does not do well.[13][18] In a 2021 buyer's guide to Cardiacs' albums, Dom Lawson of Classic Rock called "Spell with a Shell" "without doubt the finest song about a snail ever written".[17] Benac noted that "Spell with a Shell" sketches out some of the album's musical themes and lyrical concepts, calling it "a somewhat strange way to start the album" but "appropriately odd".[13][18]
Benac opined that the influence from the Pixies was most obvious on "There's Good Cud".[18] Lawson compared the sound of "There's Good Cud" to "a bomb going off in a clown-shoe factory",[17] and Benjamin called it "an electric, shouty sing-along".[10]
Lawson said that on "Wind and Rains Is Cold", Tim Smith mastered reggae.[17] Benjamin said that it "manages, against all odds to merge ska with something approaching a medieval plainsong".[10]
"Cry Wet Smile Dry" was also categorised as "Bolan-esque" glam rock by Benjamin.[10] According to Lawson, "Cry Wet Smile Dry" "uses key changes as a weapon of wonder".[17]
"Jitterbug (Junior Is A)" was described by Dawson as "woozy, meandering and just plain weird".[17] The first three minutes of "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)", which Benjamin describes as "Phil Spector style pop", feature a "warped" melody according to Kitching, "as if heard bubbling through layers of water".[9] The section from 2 minutes and 53 seconds features pulsing synthesizer and "hypnotic ghostly vocals",[15] which Kitching describes as "a one-man sci-fimadrigal",[9] and Benjamin called "a choral chant punctuated by some of the squelchiest, proggiest, keyboards this side of Rick Wakeman's front room."[10] Kitching, who was into kosmiche music including Can and Faust when he first met Tim Smith in 1992, recalls telling Smith "the thing about repetition in a piece of music is that it changes your perception of time". Smith told Kitching after finishing "Jitterbug" that he had made the song with their conversion in mind and drawn it out longer than he otherwise would have, and he had become fond of the near twenty-minute Can track "Bel Air" which closes the album Future Days.[9]
The end of "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)", had Tim Smith using several pieces of paper in order to keep track of his ideas instead of his self-imposed limit of one. According to Tim Smith, "I used to score it all out on reams and reams of paper like a twat, but nowadays I limit myself to one bit of paper just as reminders (as my memory is crap). Although one song on the ‘Guns’ album had me doing the 'reams and reams of paper' thing, it had to be done, there was no other way. I sat there for 36 hours solid and didn’t stop until it sort of brought itself to its end and when I looked back at it I wondered where the fuck it had come from because I couldn’t remember doing it."[19]
Benjamin said that "Sleep All Eyes Open", "with its repeated ecstatic yelps of "Hooray! Yeah!" – is very much cut of the same cloth" as the previous glam rock tracks, while "Ain’t He Messy Though" has a tender moment where Tim Smith sings forlornly, questioning "What's up with everyone's sad leaky / Wet and wincey eyes?".[10]
The song "Signs" "explodes through loud/quiet dynamics" that have been compared to that of the Pixies. It's about "dead balloons and rocking boys, perhaps a signifier of all that passes in life", with Benjamin calling "Signs" "perhaps the most sublime song on the record" and exceeding the Pixies.[10] He opined, "rarely has Tim’s voice been sweeter than on this track".[10]
Benjamin suggests that the title and lyrics of "Clean That Evil Mud Out Your Soul" make it sound as through "it should be at the root of some Gothic-horror or religious polemic, but wrong foots us with the immediacy of its melody and the innocent sounding backing singing."[10]
The penultimate track, "Song of a Dead Pest", was equated by Benjamin to "something of a cautionary nursery rhyme that – in some parallel universe – mothers use to instruct and warn children". "Will Bleed Amen", which closes the album, was described by Benjamin as "frantic, disorienting, compulsive, an ever-twirling multi-coloured maniacal musical spinning top", going "to the core of what Cardiacs are".[10]CD versions of Guns have a bonus track which Benjamin called "As Secret As Swans", which sounds "as if Tim has suddenly come over all Butthole Surfers"; "a song you could imagine sitting happily in the sessions for Independent Worm Saloon."[10]
Title and cover
The album's cover, which Sgrignoli calls "very kitsch",[11] uses a stormy sky of black clouds in a "sepia greeny-grey" background, with Cardiacs in large letters sprawled across the front. In contrast to the dark and gothic elements, the mirror image of the face of a "big friendly dog" creates two floating, grinning dog heads which occupy the top left and right corners.[13][10] Dogs are a recurring element associated with Cardiacs,[11] big dogs being one of their "lyrical obsessions".[10] According to the author Eric Benic, the cover matches the album's lyrical confusion, and the album title Guns also plays into Tim Smith's Dada-esque love of absurdity.[13] He commented "What do 'guns' and those grinning dog heads have to do with anything on the album? Nothing, and yet everything."[13] Benac suggested that the album's "somewhat muted response" could be explained by its randomised elements.[13]
According to Jim Smith, Tim's original plan for the cover was to use a painting of a kangaroo that he saw on the wall of a pub in Hungerford, which he bought from the landlady. Due to a mass shooting having happened in Hungerford, Tim decided when he arrived home that to use the painting on an album called Guns would be in bad taste, and the plan was shelved. The kangaroo was used as the cover of the follow-up album LSD (2025) after it ended up on Tim's wall at home.[20]
Release and promotion
Guns, released by the Alphabet Business Concern, was announced to be available in record shops from 21 June 1999,[21] a release date which the album's page on the streaming service Deezer supports.[22][b]
The first single from Guns, "Sleep All Eyes Open", released as a split CD single, or EP, with Camp Blackfoot on 5 July 1999 by Org Records,[23] after being delayed several times from mid-April and 24 May.[24] The second single, "Signs", released on 2 August 1999 as the first on Alphabet after being delayed slightly from its initial date 28 July,[23] with the song accompanied by two unreleased tracks (one being the instrumental version of “Dog Like Sparky,” from Singto God).[11]
In a review of Guns before its release, the Organzine called it "everything we needed it to be and a little bit more" and opined that it was "far more coherent that[sic]Sing to God, far more focused and concentrated, no messing about, straight in there", dubbing the album "Cardiacs' big statement".[27] Benac suggested that "maybe fans expecting another Sing to God were let down" from Guns being "fairly straightforward" in comparison.[13] Benjamin said in 2015 "perhaps it was inevitable that some were underwhelmed with Guns when it finally reached their sweaty, shaking, hands. Where were the explosions? The fire? The burning crucible of sound and surrealist imagery that made Sing to God exceptional?", calling the latter album a tough act to follow, but that time had "been kind to Guns and listening to it today, it just seems to go from strength to strength."[10] On the debate whether Guns was a weaker entry in the Cardiacs discography, he defended the album as "an evolution of sorts", saying the band "could never be accused of standing still – even when the gaps between records became longer" and that "each track on Guns is a treat and has more ideas in each of the songs than many bands pack into an entire lifetime".[10] He called the album "as good a place as any to start" for those who were not yet fans of Cardiacs and remarked that both Guns and Pony "seem to talk to you directly – if such a thing is possible in the usual amalgam of oblique images and sounds that mark Tim's oeuvre."[10]
In a 2015 article about Cardiacs by Mike Vennart for Prog, he called Guns "surprisingly mild-mannered", "more muted, soulful and sombre than all other Cardiacs albums, perhaps leaning more into the sci-fi folksy lullabies of Tim's side-project, the Sea Nymphs" and "immensely rich in timbre and ideas."[15] In a 2021 buyer's guide to Cardiacs' albums, Dom Lawson of Classic Rock said "From 1989’s still startling On Land and in the Sea to the twinkling squall of Guns a decade later, Smith matched his band's on-stage prowess with records to cherish" and that, although Smith was reportedly not happy with the sound of Guns, it "sparkles and delights with tons of their customary cracked charm".[17] Benac called Guns "a great collection" when "listened to free of context and expectations", "a fantastic, cleanly recorded, dynamic, exciting, diverse and fun rock album", and praised the album's layered production as "among the finest" of Tim Smith's career.[13]
In a 2025 Cardiacs buyer's guide for an article covering the album LSD, the magazine Uncut called Guns "a reflective set, by Cardiacs standards, where Tim Smith seems to be taking stock of the complexities of life", saying "some of his most affecting songs are here, though it still pedals through genres like nobody's business."[26]
Aftermath
According to The Rough Guide to Rock, the release of Guns sparked a "rather green patch for Cardiacs fans" as it was followed in quick succession by the compilations Songs by Cardiacs and Affectionate Friends (2001) and Greatest Hits (2002);[28] the latter package included the song "Faster than Snakes with a Ball and a Chain",[29] which was originally intended for Guns and later released in January 2025 on a vinyl 7" single with Aaron Tanner and Melodic Virtue's book Cardiacs: A Big Book and a Band and the Whole World Window.[30][31] Following Guns, Cardiacs started working on a new album which didn't take shape and was eventually shelved, according to Sgrignoli.[11] The band's concert schedule thinned out, and a tradition of large-scale annual dates around November at the London Astoria began.[11] Cardiacs had the appearance of a hiatus, but returned in the mid-2000s with a change of personnel[10] and recorded the double live set Garage Concerts, which revamps nearly all their material prior to their first CD, 1988's A Little Manand a House and the Whole World Window, including that which had never been widely released or was otherwise unavailable.[29][10] However, new material was sparse.[29] In 2007, the 3-song EP "Ditzy Scene" appeared, teasing the upcoming double album LSD, but Tim Smith had a series of strokes which put the band indefinitely on hold in 2008.[29]
Guns was reissued on vinyl in 2015.[10] It remained Cardiacs' most recent album[29][32][33] for 26 years, and was throught to be their final studio album, as the follow-up LP LSD was unreleased.[15][17][10] Several tales, some apocryphal, surrounded the legend of LSD, and Benjamin remarked that "it is that by default Guns remains effectively the last word on Cardiacs", as Smith would not be well enough to complete its follow-up.[10] On Guns' position as Cardiacs' last album, Benac commented that Cardiacs avoided the fate of most bands, "simply ending their career a sub-par record that's not up to their usual standard", which he named It's Hard (1982) by the Who an example of (discarding the two post-John Entwistle albums), and that Guns "seems to move forwards and promise new directions that were never entirely undertaken when LSD was not finished."[12] However, he opined that Guns was "imperfect"[13] and "not a career-defining work" like the previous album Sing to God could be argued to have been, and that LSD may have served as "an even bigger triumph" than Sing to God had Tim Smith's stroke or earlier struggles not ended the band's progress.[12] Because of this, Benac said that "history and fan opinion is often divided on it's qualities" and that Guns had the same fate as another Cardiacs album, Heaven Born and Ever Bright (1992), since both have a significant fan base but "came after high points in the band's career and may not seem to live up to them".[12] He said it was clear that, like Heaven Born and Ever Bright, Guns was "likely a setup for something grander: like the single or bunt that leads to a grand slam"[12] and thought it a shame that the "more psychedelic side" of Guns "wasn't explored to its logical conclusion with a follow-up album".[13]
Cardiacs kept working on LSD after Tim's illness and death, and LSD released in 2025.[33][34] Jim Smith described LSD before it had been mastered as "kind of floating somewhere between Sing to God and Guns, with lots of call backs to Little Man and a House in there as well."[31] In a review for LSD, Kitching said the album was identifiable as a logical development from Guns, with the production by Adam Noble having "a greater clarity and warmth than Smith's own on Sing To God or Guns".[34]
↑ Reissue covers feature the album title moved further to the bottom right.[1]
1 2 Apple Music and AllMusic indicate later release dates of 24 September and 7 December 1999 respectively.[2][3]Tidal also supports the 7 December release date.[4]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
