While ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! were rattling and yelping their way up to "Eighteen" and "Nineteen" way back in 2006, the palpable excitement was a simple scream of shining young eyes, torn cloth and the breathless thump of bruised ribs in the moshpits. The secret complexity of the lyrics and tempi were bonuses for those who noticed. The punk mania, the driving rhythms, the sprayed immediacy of the logo id (¡!) were a rabid cult, to join first and think about later.
But here we are, later.
Later, older, and even funkier. The adrenaline surge comes all over again. Track one, "Welcome To The Moment" is a song to immediacy - an instant crescendo from exactly where the last tour left off. It's the recognisable half-strangled disco-thrashing essence-of-elated-insanity we already love. And it's emphatically in that moment for just the first 60 seconds as we remember exactly why so many went berserk in the band's company last time round.
And it has to be as fast as 60 seconds. In the very next minute of this astonishing album it's all up the air, spiralling dizzily upwards. Everything is much bigger and much stronger. The old trademarks are there, but the sensations are more complex. Once the necessary double take is out of the way, the excitement is so much fiercer.
These Seattle recordings were expected to take things onto a new level, but they have gone further than that.. For one thing Tom's vocals are mostly audible. It's only their sense-defying poetics that defy the listener this time. The vocal stretching and twisting hasn't been stopped - but somehow whole lines sneak through in extraordinary bursts of psychedelic pattern. If the head spins too much, full written lyrics come with the beautifully designed booklet (Martin Simpson and Danny North, take a bow). Take the words as crazy ramblings if you like - they work that way just fine - but wrap your cultural antennae around them just a little and they yield a universe of acute, despairing self knowledge in a world of sepulchres and possibilities way beyond the tragedy of popular culture's narcissistic implosion. Their subversive power should be blowing lids off the nation's over-cooked domestic bliss by the time some of these CDs get taken home.
"Let me make this fucking clear: I've got a landmine attached to my leg. / With eyeballs turned inside my head / the failure of the super-ego doesn't look that comfortable." ("We Are Grey Matter")
"Into the night, and into ourselves, we forage like rats, with dirt on our hands, dirt in our hearts" ("Gravity and Heat")
Lines like these hit the gut and unlock a hundred readings - all valid, all restlessly dissatisfied with how things have become. Lines like these are red meat and lines like these are bitter medicine. Take them how you want. Some will seize them as they are. Some will choke on them (one can hope)
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But back with the production ...There's a lot more guitar, and a lot more from delays, layers and keyboards too. Bass and drums are bigger, faster, more intense. The band can play, no question. Matt Boyles who has worked with THESE ARMS ARE SNAKES has inspired and captured some huge visceral sounds on this album. Over and over, I'm getting giddy with a new burst of something like the huge MOTORHEAD-flattening riffs in "Gravity & Heat" or the gradual subliminal disorientation of the beautiful piano ballad that "Fosbury In Discontent" almost seems to be. Or the exultant climax of "Spanish Triangles" with its stadium filling chorus voices. "Won't you turn your ships around? We are all Armadas now." Here, especially, the skin tingles and the emotion races. These are songs that have been created to fill big spaces, physically and emotionally. "Give Me A Wall" filled the venues of the early days. "Life Processes" will ram the same emotional depth charges into the bigger worlds up ahead.
The songs themselves are more truly three dimensional than before. Within "We Are Grey Matter" for example, there is one of those archetypal ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA! moments: Tom Woodhead yelling into oblivion, Katy Nichols dance-drumming till the early hours, with whiskas rattling away on dislocated guitar and Rob Canning holding the funk together. But this time it's just one of the layers, thrown crosswise into the heart of a bigger song like a great shard of bomb-blasted glass into room full of beautiful chaos . Other strata hold APPLESEED CAST guitar wizardry, AT THE DRIVE IN punching, and JOY DIVISION trippiness. The changes come round so fast the only way to cope is to put the iTunes on "Repeat All" and leave it there all night.
The unnumbered single "Don't Be A Doctor" hinted at all this. Prepare to have your expectations exceeded. Note the canny licensing to Cooking Vinyl, and make plans to keep up with all the sequels to the most interesting story on the scene today. Forward is the only way.
www.forwardrussia.com
www.cookingvinyl.com
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