So have you heard the new Russian Futurists’ single yet? If not there is really no excuse, for ‘Hoeing Weeds Sowing Seeds’ is free to download from the Russian Futurists' website. Personally I’ve heard few three minute forty second slices of Pop confectionary as marvellously sweet as this all year.
To be honest though I might have missed it if I hadn’t still been subscribed to the Upper Class mailing list. I’ll admit that I had all but forgotten about the The Russian Futurists. It is, after all, nine years to the month since I first wrote about them and I don’t know about you, but a decade is a long time in my book. That first time I was writing about the exquisite ‘Let’s Get Ready To Crumble’ set. Now I listened to that marvellously succinct album again this week and it remains a firm favourite for certain. Sadly though I found 2005’s ‘Our Thickness’ a disappointment in spite of the sprightly album opener and Samsung phone feature song ‘Paul Simon’. And I remember that I’d had such high hopes...
Still, those hopes are soaring again in anticipation of the forthcoming ‘The Weight’s On The Wheels’ album. Certainly if ‘Hoeing Weeds...’ is anything to go by it will be a sparkling Pop triumph. The Upper Class website suggests that it captures The Russian Futurists in “full pop regalia”. I don’t know about you, but that sends spectacular thrills along my spine.
The Upper Class press also suggests that the production here takes The Russian Futurists’ sound “out of the bedroom and onto the airwaves”. Now I do not listen to radio so know next to nothing about airwaves but certainly the sound is one of glistening surfaces reflecting neon lights and camera flashbulbs. It sounds like a production that’s not afraid of the limelight and that’s no bad thing. It’s also a sound that lets The Russian Futurists step neatly aside from the recent glut of electro tinged (indie)Pop that’s been delighting many (me included) in recent years. But where the likes of Washed Out, Small Black, Wild Nothing et al appear to be cast in the light of the underground (as seen through a Helga Viking on a Pistil film) The Russian Futurists now sound like they’ve stepped in front of a studio full of HD video cameras with blinding spotlights glaring from the gantry. And before you recoil with a hipster’s sneer, that’s a *good* thing.
I wouldn’t have always said so. I remember many years ago writing a review for the weekly Art School leaflet where I poured scorn on The Bodines’ ‘Played’ for being ‘over produced’ and dismissed it out of hand whilst heaping glowing praise on Razorcuts’ ‘Storyteller’. Of course I was talking nonsense, at least in part. For whilst ‘Storyteller’ was indeed a magical album, ‘Played’ was no less brilliant, major-label production values and all. I’m sure it only took a few months for me to realise that at the time, but the memory of my lazy knee-jerk indie-cool response still makes me enormously embarrassed. Coincidentally, both albums have recently been reissued by Cherry Red at ridiculously low prices so there is no excuse not to pick up on both. And whilst you are at it, you also ought to pick up the reissue of Razorcuts’ second album ‘The World Keeps Turning’. For some reason I never bough this record when it first came out, although I do not entirely recall why not. I suspect it was at a time when I was much more enamoured by the burgeoning Acid House scene that Tim Vass hated so much. Either that or I could not bring myself to have such a horrid sleeve in my collection. That cover still makes me shudder I’m afraid, but Michael White’s fabulous sleevenotes more than make up for it.
In those sleevenotes Alasdair MacLean says that for him Razorcuts were “the sound of summer” yet for me they are more specifically the sound of fading summer and the oncoming autumn. A time when the paling warmth of the sun blends with the chill of the morning; the melancholy of season’s end and the beauty of landscapes colouring amber and burnt umber. A group made for just this time of year, then.