As the days lengthen and Festivals start to take up the diary spaces, how sweet to get an invitation to a special ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! gig. The band’s plan was to take an album’s worth of untried, untitled songs and perform them to an audience before flying off to America to record them.
It worked.
It worked so well that the wait for the album is going to be a bit of trial. We were in the Cockpit’s smaller room, with a friendlier feel than the big pit. It has a stage that puts the band on more of a level with the crowd.
Rob Canning's bass parts are getting bigger and beefier. Katie Nicholls' drumming is intricate, fluid and precise. Her rich technique has been given the muscle and discipline of a year of non-stop gigging. Sam Nicholls' secretly wonderful guitar playing has been growing a rack of effects and a devilish cunning in using them to good purpose. Tom Woodhead has become the confident audience focus his frenzied writhing always threatened, and his keyboard playing is physically more centre stage and musically more important to the fuller sound. The band have grown so much this year - it’s like having your kids come back from abroad, and they’re all big and knowing enough to be a bit scary if they want to be.
Tom invited us to make up our own titles for the songs. But whoever wrote the set list had to use some clues to keep the band right: DNM, DAY, INTRO, GREY MATTER, NINE, 545, PROSPECTOR, MET, TWELVE, BS, DEL it said. That made 11 songs, with 9 that none of us had heard before. They took over an hour to play. It seemed like about ten minutes, and it felt exhilarating - expectations not just met but exceeded by more than it should have been possible to achieve.
The subtle shift upwards and outwards in the last single "Don’t Be A Doctor" (not played tonight) should have been a big hint as to how things were going.
If you can imagine their sound at this time last year as a small gang of young armadillos fighting their way out of galvanised dustbin …
…got it?
Well, if you can do that … start to visualise a family of psycho bears wrecking a locked-up wasteland portacabin and liberating its inhabitants. Maybe they were the cast of a hideous reality TV plot. Or some forgotten detainees on the asylum seeking trail. Picture them being hauled roughly out into glimmers of life and sunshine and warmth. A couple start to hug and waltz. A demented kid is pogoing with delight. You’re imagination is getting closer to the future now.
Clearly, it still is ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! and forward is the word. They play fast and loose with 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 beat metres, Tom's lyrics are mysterious and surreal, still in that glorious land of ambiguity till we get the lyric sheets to decode. His voice really does sound (and sometimes disappear) like it should. A man who strangles himself with the mic lead in every other tune can’t expect a lot of sympathy from the throat specialist, can he? Katie and Rob make sure there's some kind of crazy-cider dance track going all the time. And Whiskas chops and red-peppers away at the guitar in an apparently random way. That much we already know and love.
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But is the audience going to follow them into this more elaborate land of Mogwai, Appleseed Cast, Explosions In The Sky, At The Drive In, Les Savvy Fav and a whole shop full of wider influences? I think they will … they've had "Give Me A Wall", they love it, they can shout along with the words. But they're a bright bunch and they're young. You don’t get ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! by being slow off the mark, wrinkly and conservative. The smart, creative (and probably the only) thing ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! could do was to beef it up, develop it, make it more complex and more thrilling. This is more of a space rock punk polka metal disco band with a soft spot for the idea of supporting Hawkwind touring in Iceland. Or something.
Even so, it’s going to be a long wait, kids. The thing isn’t even recorded yet. Enjoy the fresh simplicity of the last album while you still can!
Being ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA!, the night would never have just been about them. Old pals and rivals THIS ET AL played an opening set that blistered the floor and shuddered the railway lines over our heads. (It was a deliriously loud night all round). There was innovation here too. I'm not sure of the name (stupid old fool, I forgot to ask) but drummer Steve was joined by a second percussionist on several tracks - something Steve tells me is still being tried out. It worked for me.
The overall effect is a real pile driving energy that gives the shivering, slashing vocal and guitar lines much more to cut into. Did someone say Muse? I don’t hear it myself. PLACEBO maybe? Maybe not. But like ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA!, THIS ET AL have been doing a lot of gigs and their sound is also moving up towards the kind of scale that can dominate a big stage with the same kind of rush that has had them battering smaller venues into submission over the last year or two. Their epic "Baby Machine" album is very successfully rekindled in this kind of performance, and new bass player Ben plays his part very convincingly. The benign influence of producer Richard Green is more apparent too.
THIS ET AL's set list went, with their defining and furious intensity: Figure 8, No Time To Panic, The Loveliest Alarm, You've Driven For Miles, Special Bear and Wardens. Three of which I am not familiar with - so that was a huge bonus too.
http://www.myspace.com/forwardrussia
http://www.myspace.com/thisetal
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