We like brats. Brats are great value to watch and sometimes produce unwieldy and thrilling rock music. Stars rarely align for would-be brats, however, often because they ignore a few cardinal rules. A brat must earn their right to be obnoxious or difficult. They ought to be a demonstrably disturbed genius, a child prodigy, or have climbed their way out of living hell (can be their parents’ backwater suburban home) to grace the stage. Encouraging brats that are undeserving of this “entertaining brat” status is not for the greater good, because we don’t want a world full of substandard rock icons. Or do we?

Warhorse trashed Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory late in 2008, convincing a few erstwhile ambivalent punters with a penchant for mindless destruction to check them out. But unlike, say, Ghosts of Television, who trash stuff and also make awesome music, Warhorse’s antics are sadly where the fun ends. Their debut EP Gun$ isn’t as furiously combative as you might like to expect.

It is bratty though, insofar as the lyrics are typically facetious and cocky. Sense often acquiesces to rhyme (“I’m the king of bad life choices/ I’ve got no time for whiny voices”), guitar riffs are lumbering and caustic, and there is a seedy rock’n’roll groove here that some people are just going to buy no matter what. Jasper Clifford-Smith has a voice reminiscent of Bobby Gillespie (accent and all) and a swagger inhibited only by infrequent bouts of female-related insecurities. The songwriting sounds spontaneous and perfunctory, catchy as all hell and riddled with the type of offhand nihilism that works when you’re given reason to believe it.

Gun$ conjures images of seedy rock-n-roll nightclubs the likes of which don’t even exist in Sydney anymore, where it’s smoky, open until 7am and full of smashed leather-clad junkies. Warhorse could get away with being this referential if the charisma were intact, but when the songs lack any discernable urgency it just comes across as a passable tribute to that old-fashioned concept of “rock’n’roll”. I’m afraid Gun$ is for indiscriminate rock fans only, while the rest of us hope that Warhorse’s songs develop into something as threatening and legitimately exciting as their live show.

by Shaun Prescott