Josh Bannister announced his departure from Milk Teeth at the start of 2016. It didn’t take long for Gun Shy to emerge, an instant musical explanation of his departure. Taking the grunge inspired tones of his former outfit, the Southampton based four-piece presented a whole new experimental veneer. ‘First Transmission’, the debut Gun Shy EP, was (and remains) an unpredictable manipulation of genre-dependent soundscapes. Too heavy for shoegaze, too complex for indie and by far too gently atmospheric for grunge, it saw Gun Shy stamp their own unique mark on their sound – self-confessed as only the beginning of their musical journey.
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“The recording process was different than anything I’ve personally partaken in before,” Josh explains of ‘First Transmission’s creation. “We did the majority of the recording ourselves in the early hours of the morning over the course of a month or so at The Ranch. This gave us a lot of room to breathe, time to reflect and change aspects of the songs with more leisure than if we had booked studio time and hashed the record out over a week.”
It provided a release of the shackles that had emerged around Josh’s involvement with Milk Teeth. Gun Shy and ‘First Transmission’ began to represent creative freedom. Yet despite the necessity to change the way he recorded, Josh concedes that, moving forward, things will change.
“This worked well for us but I doubt it’s something we will do again for a long time at least,” he adds. “I would recommend this approach to any band doing their first record, it gave us time to learn more about what our sound is and get closer as friends not just as musicians. We plan to enter the studio “properly” next time and gain from that not only a record but another batch of knowledge and experiences as a band.”
“We listen to a lot of really different stuff, and I think that’s integral to keeping our sound interesting – we try not to repeat ourselves and ‘First Transmission’ definitely acts as a good reflection of that.”
Photos by Gingerdope Photography.
The combination of styles running through ‘First Transmission’ is remarkable. The type of music presented in the five tracks doesn’t just appear by accident. There’s an air of the calculated and the meticulous around the EP, one that introduces Bannister (joined by George Turner, Dom Wright and principle co-songwriter Will Palmer) as keen musical analysts. The result however flows with an unquestioned effervescent freedom.
“Dynamics were really important to us in our writing and I think songs like ‘Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine’ (Modest Mouse) and ‘Anything’ (From Indian Lakes) influenced us greatly in terms of not making the transition between the loud and calm parts crude,” Will Palmer explains of the tracks that accompanied their studio experience. “Hum are especially great at this, but all of those bands have a great understanding of the importance of dynamics and it’s something we all tried to utilise in our own writing.”
“‘A Forest’ by The Cure is really important too – The Cure are a huge inspiration for me personally but their minimal approach to creating ambience and conveying moods in their songs is definitely something that we considered in writing the calmer parts of ‘First Transmission’.”
“Equally so, bands like Balance And Composure and Big Ups are important to us for the really hectic parts on the record. It’s especially fun to write and play heavy parts, but it’s also easy to get carried away. Those bands can sound huge, but it’s not messy and that’s something we wanted to incorporate into our writing.”
“Bright Eyes is on the list too, and I know we all agree that Conor Oberst is a songwriting genius. There’s an honesty to his work that’s really refreshing and there’s nothing forced about it at all, especially in his delivery of the vocals, which is an ethic we also try to be true to. Andy Shauf also has a similar sensibility to his writing that we took inspiration from.”
We asked Gun Shy and Failure By Design Records – the band’s home – to pull their inspirational tracks together into a playlist. Hear the twelve tracks that influenced ‘First Transmission’ below, and subscribe to Failure By Design’s Spotify account. If you don’t have Spotify, you can listen to each individual track below the player. For more on Gun Shy, head to Facebook.