Music
Gun Shy’s five essential bands that shaped them
Gun Shy is the efforts of former Milk Teeth founding member Josh Bannister, who’s poured his creativity and unique musicianship into a new project with equally new bandmates Will Palmer, George Turner and Dom Wright.
Ahead of unveiling their debut release, First Transmission, Gun Shy talk us through five of their favourite bands and how they take influence from them today…
1. From Indian Lakes have influenced the bright, clean and lightly distorted guitar tones that George uses throughout the record. They also have help solidify our love of dynamic variation, something we strive to do often; by creating space and using each instrument purposefully or not at all.
2. The Menzingers’ On The Impossible Past – This record has helped us because The Menzingers have a way of writing that is simple and honest. There is no time for any facades or hidden meanings and the record is lyrically great with both interesting imagery and literal meanings that you can relate to. This drove us
to make sure that whilst keeping the flowery language and use of metaphor to make sure that we always get the point across.
3. Modest Mouse have been hugely influential – maybe not in the sense that they have influenced us sonically but more their unconventional approach to instrumentation. In writing songs we’ve adopted a work ethic that tends to encourage shying away from anything that could be perceived as ‘easy’ or conventional and Modest Mouse set the bar very high for this kind of writing.
4. June of 44 – When it comes to spoken word a lot of bands come to mind but none as much as June of 44, it may be due to the way in which they go about this. They combine often very heavy subject matter with extremely dainty, almost placid, music that can suddenly take on that characteristic of math rock. I think their unconventional sound almost sparks a want to lean away from the norm to try for something that feels unnatural.
5. Elliott Smith – Elliott was a genius without a doubt, musically and lyrically everything was crafted so perfectly, the want to create something dark and honest but also so utterly beautiful is something we strive for on a lot of our slower material and to say Elliott Smith doesn’t inspire you as a song writer is outrageous. You get out what you put it and he is one of the best.
Listen to Gun Shy now at welcometogunshy.bandcamp.com and head over to Ticketmaster.co.uk/Rising for all things new music.
