Bring Back the Guns: BringBacktheGuns.jpg
Bring Back the Guns' music crackles with energy and makes the heart race. It isn't simple, and it's often weird, but these are the very reasons it engages you.
Ryan Hull -- bass
Erik Bogle -- guitar
Thomas Clemmons -- drums
Matt Brownlie -- vocals, guitar
It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.
I Am the Voice of Sarah Strickland's Rage
It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.
Dry's Future
It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.
The Season For Treason
Unmastered Futures, 2005
Groceries/DrillboxIgnition, 2001
Knuckleheads and Icons, 2000
This is a story of making it big in Houston.
Bring Back the Guns has been around for seven years, during which it toured nationally, had label interest and became a beloved part of our music scene. It makes perfect sense, then, that the band recently played a show to four people.
"We promoted that show as well as we've promoted any of our shows," guitarist and vocalist Matt Brownlie said. "No one turned out. You can be one of the more established bands in town and still just immediately hit a brick wall without warning. You'd think we could have brought eight people out."
In 2001, Brownlie said the band, then known as Groceries, was as big as it was going to get in Houston. He still believes that to be true.
"Experience tells me that it's not possible to get bigger here," he says. "If you want to live in Houston and make music in Houston — which we do — you understand that you'll hit that boundary sooner or later."
Drummer Thomas Clemmons adds, "That's not to say that it's a waste of time to play here, but there are only a certain amount of people who go to shows in Houston, and I think maybe they've all seen us."
This all begs the question: Why stay?
"We really like it here," Brownlie says. "I'm influenced by the strange, awesome, gimpy music scene we have here and the way it functions. The fact that Houston is overlooked as a music scene means that people are making uncompromised music with no ambition toward a career. They're making the music that matters to themselves and their 20 closest friends."
Bring Back the Guns — which includes guitarist Erik Bogle and bassist Ryan Hull — is making some of the most original music in the city. The band's music crackles with energy and makes the heart race. It isn't simple, and it's often weird, but these are the very reasons it engages you. You listen, you try to piece together what is being said and why, and then the key changes or the song stops and the rug is pulled out from under you.
The Art of Malnutrition , which appears on this year's Unmastered Futures , opens with a spindly guitar-and-drum duet that tiptoes quickly then hesitates, then moves again like a cat hunting a bug. It's just a brief, standout moment on an album filled with surprising musical moments. Radio Song '04 is a tense squall about the repetitive nature of the mind and our culture, until a point midway in the song when Brownlie says, "I bet we wouldn't talk so much if we learned how to dance." It may be arty, but it's true.
Brownlie is an able frontman. He sings, but also talks and screams, with boyish fervor. His delivery is loopy, mysterious and smart. And you can imagine him standing with his band on the cover of a magazine, the latest indie rock heroes to infiltrate the mainstream.
They laugh off the shows that didn't attract an audience because they can, because even if everyone in this city who wants to see them has, their fans continue to increase outside of Houston.
"We're aiming to do our most ambitious tour to date soon, about 35 dates or so," Brownlie says. "We've done three other month-long tours and a week here, a week there."
With each city the band hits — favorites include Knoxville, Tenn., and St. Louis — their fan base grows by word of mouth.
"The word seems to be creeping around," Bogle says. "People from cities we've never been to are asking us to do shows there and they want to buy our CDs. That's promising to me. If you look at a map you can see these clusters of fans creeping out from places where we played for five kids, and they went and spread the word."
In true do-it-yourself fashion, the underground rumblings have reached fans who are now becoming "industry," as Brownlie calls them. It's the fans setting up shows and fans starting record labels. It's help like this that will allow Bring Back the Guns to make a career out of music.
"I feel like we learned a lot in the past four or five years," Brownlie says. "We've gotten to a point where we put the experience we've gained to work and we've finally got a lineup that can tour without gigantic commitments.
"We're getting to the point where we might not have to consider moving to Austin or New York or Chicago. The work that we've been doing from here over the past couple of years is starting to pay off."
-- Sara Cress | Sept. 14, 2005
Ramon Medina
Post new comment