Albums

Album Review: ¡Forward, Russia!

Album: Life Processes
Label: Cooking Vinyl

Surpassing the impact that the band had with their debut effort, ‘Give Me A Wall’, was always going to be a tough ask for this Leeds quartet. There’s the same frantic drumming momentum and piercing vocal peaks on the faster tracks, but what ‘Life Processes’ offers us anew is sweeping synthesized effects that take you lurching from pillar to post, drunkenly weaving, through kaleidoscopic sonic backdrops of emotion.

This new approach allows Tom Woodhead’s gasping, urgent vocal to go even one step further than before. I find myself breathless just listening to him and begin frantically searching round the room for a defibrillator in case he goes over the edge. He’s Robert Smith on helium and is particularly dominating on the spasmodic and visceral ‘A Prospector Can Dream’. It’s easy to admire its piercing quality, and then as before, it all gets a bit too much to take and becomes overpowering.

There are moments of musical genius here, particularly at the back end of the album. ‘Gravity & Heat’ has a thumping, bounding bassline that combines neatly with a series of echoing guitars. They lift the track out from the album’s repetitious overwrought vocal and sadistically simplistic drum patterns, serving as sweet relief. The beautiful ‘Fosbury In Discontent’ is a fine track to follow with everything played slow and steady as piano nudges along an insanely classy vocal. This track plus ‘Spanish Triangles’ proves Woodhead’s range far outreaches what has gone before. So why does he continue to waste it by beating us into boredom with his ostentatious whining?

New-wave has never sounded so pretentious, post-punk has never sounded so lackadaisical and yet the band have managed to tie the whole caboodle tightly together, certainly with each part kicking and screaming at each other, and hold it there long enough to keep us guessing on each and every track. It certainly needs a lot of loving, this one, because it doesn’t get you straight away, but when it all finally clicks into place it proves to be something worth holding onto. A slow-burner then, but an album that shows ¡Forward, Russia! are certainly progressing in the right direction… albeit ponderously slowly.

For fans of: The Cure, The Cribs, Test Icicles
Band links = ¡Forward, Russia!

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Tags: album, cd, forward russia, life processes, review, cure, cribs, experimental, cooking vinyl

John’s review also appears in TLOBF.

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