Today we’ve got an explosive single to premier that honestly freaked us out a little bit when we heard it. More than a thunderous joyride through frantic riffs and high-pitched screams, it uses borderline lethal doses of irony to lift the veil on a sentiment that’s deeply American.
“Gun” comes courtesy of Yammer Jaw, a twisted but brilliant post-hardcore group from Tennessee that takes no prisoners, and one of their most distinct qualities isn’t just their fury, it’s how they embed that fury in semi-melodic moments in the style of legends like Drive Like Jehu and Unsane.
We wouldn’t go so far as it’s a sweet-and-sour dynamic or a heavy verse into hooky chorus kind of thing. Yammer Jaw just knows how to strike a balance that feels consistent, but never stable. “Cuckin’ Around,” the previous single teasing their upcoming album Burth was a lot of fun, but “Gun” is even darker, and perhaps even better for it. Check out the Jim Valosik directed video below:
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Funnily enough there’s a personal connection to the song that makes us vaguely uncomfortable, but we say it often around here – good art has a habit of making people’s skin crawl. “Gun” does just that for us, and it might for a lot of you as well. We grew up with guns and people that collected them to feel a certain way, and the song took us back to being a nervous child being taught how to disassemble, clean, reassemble, even modify firearms. It was never a passion, just kind of a thing we did, and we always wondered why. “Gun” gives some context to situations like that, and as tense as it made us feel at first, in the end it was more like a concentrated dose of highly effective therapy. Actually, bassist Ian Sandsturm had this to say:
“‘Gun’ takes aim at the way status gets measured by the weapons you possess. There’s this idea that owning a gun makes you somebody. That it says something about your worth as a man. We wanted to write a song that sits inside that logic instead of just pointing at it from the outside.”
“When coping mechanisms distort your self-awareness to the point that your gun becomes core to your personality, it’s time for an intervention,” adds guitarist Stephen Small. “No one says you can’t protect yourself, but owning a gun doesn’t make you better than anyone else.”
Ultimately we find ourselves looking forward to more of this cacophonous discomfort when Burth drops September 18th. We have a feeling it’s going to skyrocket with fans of the gristly, slightly more artsy side of punk and post-hardcore, and at Fecking Bahamas we know that’s most of the people reading this.
(Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more music, check out our Bandcamp compilations here. If you like us, or possibly even love us, donations are always appreciated at the Buy Me A Coffee page here as well. Don’t let the bastards get you down!)