- Welcome to Daytrotter
- After The War
- Bones
- Dearly Departed
- The Weight of the World
Some people are just drawn to the heavier things. They cannot be bothered with the trifling things that you can just sneeze at and blow completely out of your periphery. They would much rather dig in, right there in the trenches and go hand-to-hand with whatever monsters and chokeholds might be out there to encounter. They want to take on the density of the experience, or all of the experiences, not wanting to find anything to be too easily attained or come to. If it’s worth having, it’s only worth gaining through maximum excursion and excruciating sacrifice.
Young Guns, a group from Buckinghamshire, England, finds itself of this mind, writing nothing about the trivial parts of existing, but of the ancient struggles that man has always grappled with. They are the ideas of war, the problems of the psyche and the sensation of being nothing more than a peanut in the turd that the universe pooped out once and left steaming in the tall grass somewhere.
Lead singer Gustav Wood makes these predicaments feel epic and demanding. These acoustic versions of four songs – two of which appear on the band’s recent EP “Bones” – accentuate the traumatic sense incorporated within the emotions that are depicted here. These people aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do with themselves. Everything’s difficult and it doesn’t even really matter if anyone one else appreciates that or not. It’s still going to take that one man taking on his demons and the weight of the world that he feels is destined, or designated for he alone, with no help from anyone else. He will walk alone and that sense only contributes to the overwhelming feeling that all of it brings. Wood sings about “a mountain that I get to climb” and how he’ll “get there if it kills me.”
While there’s a sense that all of this is too much to bear, all of these people that Young Guns sing about are up for the fight. They’re going to go down swinging because they don’t see another way. They recognize that even when they’ve gone down, even when they’ve stayed on their feet – tired from all that swinging, it might not be what they wanted, or what they expected, but they’ll see what it’s like when they get there, for, “After the war, nobody feels the same.”