We’ve mentioned more than once that our next album is being written in a completely different way from our norm. Rather than penning full songs from scratch, we’ve come up with riffs and beats that we’ve fitted together, jigsaw-style. This has led to much experimentation, and as a by-product a further concept has arisen: to play the same section more than once in a song but in a completely disparate genre each time.

When you finally get to hear the whole album, you’ll likely notice this technique dotted around throughout. To give you an example here and now, though, here’s a short disco-inspired sequence in demo form:

http://www.thehomeguard.info/demos/Pistols_at_Dawn_disco_section_(Demo).mp3

Then we asked ourselves the question, What would the same thing sound like if we were playing a sort of ballad? This is our answer:

http://www.thehomeguard.info/demos/Pistols_at_Dawn_ballad_section_(Demo).mp3

So, same chords and recognisably the same section, but different beat, bassline, instrumentation, melody, etc. Anyway, these are brief snatches from a song we’re calling Pistols at Dawn, the opening track on our forthcoming album. We’ve previously uploaded other snippets from the same piece, and just for fun, here’s another, complete with some vocals:

http://www.thehomeguard.info/demos/Pistols_at_Dawn_dark_section_(Demo).mp3

Make of those lyrics what you will. We’ll also leave to your imagination for now just how all of these bite-size chunks will fit together. Is Pistols at Dawn coming across as a very fragmented piece to you? More than likely it is, but that’s the challenge we set for ourselves. Can we make a prog-esque album that actually sounds relatively accessible? Probably not, but that’s the aim…