Both
Sing to God and
Guns display the band's harder edged,
metal-leaning sound which they had retained since slimming to a four piece on 1992's
Heaven Born and Ever Bright. The reviewer Stuart Benjamin of
Echoes and Dust described the album as "
Rock 'n' Roll with more than a touch of the
baroque". and more
glam rock nuances began to come to the fore on tracks such as "Spell with a Shell". Sgrignoli described
Guns as a return to the band's
post-punk impetuosity, maintainging the
Beatlesque flair that dominated
Sing to God, and the passion for contortions and stylistic blends. He suggests that the stylistic variety of
Guns highlights an aspect of Cardiacs that commentators have emphasized since the first albums: the "overflowing
Englishness" of the Cardiacs formula, including the "fundamental" ingredients of late beat pop, the sound of
two-tone, 1977
punk and
progressive rock, which have an "inescapably British connotation". led to the songs "There's Good Cud" and "Signs" being compared to that of the band the
Pixies (pictured in 2005), an influence on Tim Smith. The album's
production is
layered, featuring keyboards which "loop throughout the
mix" and vocals that "come and go". Sgrignoli described the album's keyboards as "
tasteless", but "fortunately flanked by some more convincing
electronic forays". The writer Eric Benac noted that Tim Smith tried "a few new contemporary tricks, such as the
droning sound of
shoegaze and the extreme
dynamics of the
Pixies" and took them "to a new level by utilising his superior
songwriting skills to create an ever-shifting
collage of sounds that still remain
pop songs". Sgrignoli commented that Saddington's balanced timbre on "Wind And Rains Is Cold", "Clean That Evil Mouth Out Your Soul" and "Will Bleed Amen" contrasted with Smith's usual "moan" and resulted in "unexpected and reassuring openness". According to Benac, Cardiacs feel "closer to the
psychedelic label Tim approved of" on
Guns, with "each song possessing a warmth that the often harsh
Sing to God tones did not". According to Sgrignoli,
Guns is considered one of the group's most accessible albums, with Benac calling it "fairly straightforward" compared to its predecessor. Benjamin suggests that the difference between
Guns and the other Cardiacs albums is that
Guns has the band's musical influences "well to the fore", with the addition of "a large
wall-of-sound glam-rock influence which makes the record extremely accessible, musically." He suggested that pointers to the sound of
Guns are in the band
Spratley's Japs, which hailed from the
New Forest and featured Tim Smith and Jo Spratley. Their album
Pony, which was recorded in 1998 and released in 1999, the same year as
Guns, "shares much of the DNA of
Guns" and "has a very intimate feel" that "seems to have been carried over into the
Guns sessions", with Tim having had a large hand in the writing and production of
Pony. Uncut commented that
Guns became Cardiacs' "most intimate album yet" and called it "one of Cardiacs' most heart-rending collections of songs, with a deep melancholic undertow". Lyrically, Tim Smith embraces the
cut-and-paste approach that he had occasionally toyed with, according to Benac, with all the songs on
Guns featuring "strange word combinations and a sense of
Burroughs-ian
randomness", though retaining "an atmosphere unique to" each one.
Guns features several of the lyrical themes typical of Cardiacs, including dogs (cover art, tracks 6 and 12) and dirtiness (tracks 7, 8, 9, and 12). Another theme common throughout the album is transformation, such as the snail in "Spell With a Shell" growing wings. Benjamin said that "lyrically,
Guns is as dense, wilfully confusing, and obscure as
Sing to God or any other Cardiacs recording. As Tim's querulous voice squawks and shrieks through each number, the songs unfold like puzzles, offering no answers or points of navigation for those who journey with them. Perhaps the biggest puzzle is how they shoehorn those ungainly sentences and verses to fit the meter of the music, but somehow they always do."
Side one The album opener, "Spell with a Shell", is psychedelic in texture and tone, with Benjamin describing it as "a glam-rock
Bolan-esque stomp". The song mainly focuses musically on keyboard loops with a "steady drum pound" from Leith, and centres around a "one-note bass thud", while female singers make an appearance. The chorus has a dynamic shift, with the introduction of guitars and a "tricky chord progression playing out over layered voices". An extended second verse, the female
chorus, and "backward keyboard lines" emphasise a feeling of tension, with the song's ending coming "abruptly on a hammered guitar line". The song's implicitly violent lyrics are of a visiting
snail named by the uncertain singer and threatened for growing wings, being personally controlled in their relationship, punished and burned when the snail does not do well. In a 2021
buyer's guide to Cardiacs' albums, Dom Lawson of
Classic Rock called "Spell with a Shell" "without doubt the finest song about a snail ever written". Benac noted that "Spell with a Shell" sketches out some of the album's musical themes and lyrical concepts, calling it "a somewhat strange way to start the album" but "appropriately odd". Benac opined that the influence from the Pixies was most obvious on "There's Good Cud", which begins with a loudly-mixed
sliding guitar noise that shifts into an
acoustic rhythm. A
distorted guitar enters between each line of the lyrics, creating a dynamic shifting sound, and the chorus "pushes into electric guitars and pummeling drum rhythms", instrumentation which is maintained as the second verse increases the song's intensity and the drums increase in pace. Another dynamic shift, in a type of mini-climax common throughout the album, contains a sustained
guitar solo before "a few moments of stop-and-start", with the third verse following the same structure as the first but only featuring bass and drums in the between-line music. Lyrically, Bennac suggests that the song's perspective causes an uncertain tone similar to that of the
unreliable narrator in
novels or
short stories, and that "good
cud" perhaps "exists as a platonic ideal of itself". He questions if the line "I'm a sister's boy" is a reference to
incest or a mere play on words on being a "
mother's boy". Lawson compared the sound of "There's Good Cud" to "a bomb going off in a clown-shoe factory", and Benjamin called it "an electric, shouty
sing-along". Lawson said that on "Wind and Rains Is Cold", Tim Smith mastered
reggae. Benjamin said that it "manages, against all odds to merge
ska with something approaching a medieval
plainsong", and Sgrignoli called the track's "ska flourishes" a recurring element associated with Cardiacs. Leith's rhythm is mixed loud and bass is limited to one note per bar. A gentler track, Benac opined that Smith placed "Wind and Rains Is Cold" in a "perfect position to ease the tension" after the first two "frantic" ones. Lyrically, the song contains religious references and violence, with an army dashing and calling out alarms. Benac describes Tim Smith's vocal as "laid back", and Sarah's as shifting to
Sea Nymphs territory with gentler music as she "beautifully" describes hair waving in the wind as being like "meadow grass under the flood". Sarah leads the song's vocal over
organ chords with a "soaring sound emphasizing the album's spacey feel", with the chorus bringing a morbid "dark and brooding mood" with England-appropriate weather. The shorter verse describes somebody "a quivering" with cleanliness, while Benac suggests that Sarah's pre-chorus could show the cleanly person being turned dirty with hate and fear. Many of the lyric lines of "Wind and Rains Is Cold" and later on side two "Clean That Evil Mud Out Your Soul" come from the 1955 film
The Night of the Hunter. In particular, the film inspired the line "Hide your hair, it's waving all lazy and soft like meadow grass under the flood". "Cry Wet Smile Dry" was also categorised as "Bolan-esque" glam rock by Benjamin. According to Lawson, "Cry Wet Smile Dry" "uses
key changes as a weapon of wonder". The song recalls elements of
sea shanties and
nursery rhymes. "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)" was described by Dawson as "woozy, meandering and just plain weird". The first three minutes of "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)", which Benjamin describes as "
Phil Spector style pop", feature a "warped" melody according to Kitching, "as if heard bubbling through layers of water". The section from 2 minutes and 53 seconds features pulsing
synthesizer and "hypnotic ghostly vocals", which Kitching describes as "a one-man
sci-fi madrigal", and Benjamin called "a choral
chant punctuated by some of the squelchiest, proggiest, keyboards this side of
Rick Wakeman's front room." Kitching, who was into
kosmiche music including
Can and
Faust when he first met Tim Smith in 1992, recalls telling Smith "the thing about
repetition in a piece of music is that it changes your perception of time". Smith told Kitching after finishing "Jitterbug" that he had made the song with their conversion in mind and drawn it out longer than he otherwise would have, and he had become fond of the near twenty-minute Can track "Bel Air" which closes the album
Future Days. At the end of the lyrics for "Jitterbug (Junior Is A)", the author effectively thanks the listener for sticking with the song. "Jitterbug" forced Smith to once again work from a
score since abandoning score writing by
Sing to God.
Side two Sgrignoli called "Sleep All Eyes Open" an unprecedented hybrid of
alternative dance and glam rock which "seems to directly anticipate
Late of the Pier". Benjamin said that "Sleep All Eyes Open", "with its repeated ecstatic yelps of 'Hooray! Yeah!' – is very much cut of the same cloth" as the previous glam rock tracks. Sgrignoli describes "Clean That Evil Mud Out Your Soul" as having an atmosphere of old
traveling carousels with
barrel organs and
carillons. Benjamin suggests that the song's title and lyrics make it sound as through "it should be at the root of some
Gothic-horror or religious
polemic, but wrong foots us with the immediacy of its melody and the innocent sounding backing singing." "Ain't He Messy Though" recalls elements burrowed from
folk music. Benjamin mentioned that "Ain't He Messy Though" has a tender moment where Tim Smith sings forlornly, questioning "What's up with everyone's sad leaky / Wet and wincey eyes?". The song "Signs" "explodes through loud/quiet dynamics" that have been compared to that of the Pixies. It's about "dead balloons and rocking boys, perhaps a signifier of all that passes in life", with Benjamin calling "Signs" "perhaps the most sublime song on the record" and exceeding the Pixies. He opined, "rarely has Tim’s voice been sweeter than on this track". The penultimate track, "Song of a Dead Pest", was equated by Benjamin to "something of a cautionary nursery rhyme that – in some parallel universe – mothers use to instruct and warn children". Sgrignoli assigned the same atmosphere of carousel instruments to "Song of a Dead Pest" as "Clean That Evil Mud Out Your Soul. "Will Bleed Amen", which closes the album, was described by Benjamin as "frantic, disorienting, compulsive, an ever-twirling multi-coloured maniacal musical spinning top", going "to the core of what Cardiacs are".
CD versions of
Guns have a
bonus track which Benjamin called "As Secret As Swans", which sounds "as if Tim has suddenly come over all
Butthole Surfers"; "a song you could imagine sitting happily in the sessions for
Independent Worm Saloon." == Title and cover ==