Aural Aggravation

Liquid Len Recording Company – 28th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I suppose I lost track of ‘new goth’ bands at the end of the 90s, and am still a way behind even now I’m a bit more back on it, and so History Of Guns, described by Mick Mercer – the authority on all things goth, who’s Gothic Rock Black Book was a bible for be when I was 13 and discovering the scene, as “By far, the most inventive UK band to have got their hands caught in the Industrial threshing machine” – bypassed me.

As the parenthetical numerals in the title suggests, this is a remixed version of their debut single, released twenty-five years ago, and it’s accompanied by a brace of new songs by way of B-sides, in the way things used to be done back then, when you had 12” and CD singles – and while I don’t get nostalgic for much, there was something special about these formats. Then there’s the fact a 12” single used to cost about £3.50 and a CD single a couple of quid – which probably sounds as incredible as a £1 pint or 3p tin of beans (Kwik-Save, No-Frills, c1995) to anyone under 35 – meant they were affordable, accessible.

But while we’re talking nostalgia and the passage of time, the accompanying video uses footage, originally filmed by Danni Cutmore on a VHS camera, of the band writing and performing the song at Earthworks studio in Barnet in 1998. It’s grainy, fuzzy, saturated, and looks like it could just have easily have bene shot in 1988, or even 1978. On the one hand, digital technology means the quality of video footage, even when shot on a cheapy mobile phone, is usually crisper, and isn’t prone to deterioration – but on the other, it’s so commonplace, it has less currency and less buzz about it, somehow.

The music itself… yes, it’s got that vintage post-punk feel to it, spun with an industrial edge, and pitching the band alongside Alien Sex Fiend, Cabaret Voltaire, Nitzer Ebb, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, Deathboy, The Prodigy, and LCD Soundsystem is all quite fair enough.

The classic spindly goth guitar sound spins spidery webs across a thumping drum machine, and there’s that quintessential low-slung bass groove… not to mention Del Gilbert’s theatrical baritone which looms powerfully over all of it. But then there are shuddering laser synth blasts which bubble up from nowhere, fizzes and whizzing and bleeps create the sensation of listening to two songs at the same time. Perversely, it somehow works, not least of all because there are strong hooks and the beat hits just right.

First B-side, ‘i am defective’ shows how they’ve evolved: it’s a dubby instrumental which leans far more into the electronic territory which only coloured their debut single. It’s also harder-edged and more overtly industrial, too, not just with the electronics, but the crunching, serrated guitars which cut in and threaten speaker damage. ‘LMS (Deep Mix)’ – a radical reworking of ‘Little Miss Suicide’ is in the vein of Rosetta Stone circa The Tyranny of Inaction – at least to begin with, but then swerves hard into the kind of electronica that qualified as technogoth or even cybergoth and reminding me why I drifted from the goth scene at the time. Now, I’m a bit more open to these things, and as an example of hard-edged industrial goth, it’s solid.

This release presents a neat straddling of the band’s formative years and their current sound: a clear win for fans, and a neat introduction for the unfamiliar.

AA

AA