RECORDED IN HELL, MASTERED IN HEAVEN

The Russian Futurists – “Let’s Get Ready To Crumble”

I forgot I had hairs on the back of my neck. Not that he’d use something as crass as a pun but that he’d use it like that. I’m not ever going to talk about the album’s title, so you can stop thinking that’s the pun. No, it comes in the opening song’s first line, announced with an assassin’s quiet: “I do pop cause that’s what my heart goes.” Take a second to let it slide down the throat, to kick. And the delivery: each word a shallow cascade till the ‘no sir’ declares the last droop of the first line’s sine wave. I never went to the fair, especially not in the seventies, so I can’t tell you that the opening synth-twirl motif sounds exactly like that. But I can say that that’s what it sounds like to me. That’s useful, right? I can say about how the intruding drums chomp up the vocal, hiding it; I mean to say I could say that but it’d only be half true. Matthew did this lots on “The Method of Modern Love”: vocal low and layered like 3d light, to mean solid, or rather trans-solid 3d light, of course. Kinda like he sings the line & that’s put out but the line’s memory also invades the mix, half a millisecond behind the line, shunting it forward.

It’s only a short album, I know that. It only says, like, 27:10 minutes on my CD player when the CD runs dry. Which is a good word to use, I think, ‘cause the bluuts & plaffs of a lot of the drums sound like the plashing of rain. Wet, y’know, like they’re lifted from the sound of kids in puddles. Especially on “When The Sun Drops Like An Anvil”. A dense song, so dense I couldn’t even tell you about the other music. That’s not the drumming, that is. I’ll probably just say it’s all swirly and translucent because that’s exactly what a good description would be.

It’s really hard to tell what kind of music this is but that’s the point of this, right? The third song’s a clue, “Precious Metals”. He’s completely original: a beat-driven, pop, bouncy walkin-down-the-street-oh-look-thekidsinthefirehydrantagain-loveliness jaunt. Obviously, that’s what I wrote before the cryptomnesia dissolved. I’ve heard this song lots. On the radio. It’s a beat driven, pop… Oh, yeah, I said.

The guitar on “It’s Actually Going to Happen” sounds like an aborting sigh that realises its needed, looking like its going, going, but eventually settles on following through. I mean kinda. That’s a bit abstract for a guitar arc. I suppose it just means that it sounds like it’s a receding hair-line that may not have given up just yet but eventually gives up in the end. Which is a bit more clear. If less concrete. Let’s see, try: de-punked Josef K guitar shimmer, like “Chance Meeting” debanged. Just the intro, mind. Or the whole song. Which doesn’t even approach going near the rhythm. If I knew how to put both ‘crepuscular’ and ‘muscular’ in the same sentence, non-clumsy like, I could begin to tell you about that.

Sorry. I forgot to say why it all matters. The album. This is where Daniel Bedingfield is useful: to project onto. Some people think, maybe just thought, now, that it would be impossible to make a Big Lush Important Sound in a small messy unimportant bedroom. They never told Daniel this. He already knew. It’s why he made, partially why he made “Gotta Get Thru This”, which is an album. It’s big pop made in a little bedroom for big audiences. Matthew is on Upper Class. That’s his label. To make the point. See, he knows he won’t be making for big audiences. But this is still big pop made in little bedrooms. I know, or maybe just think, Matthew would like a big audience but he knows that on Upper Class that’s not possible. This is pop destined to unpopularity. That’s not why it matters, which is to say that is why it matters but I’m not going to be as direct as “This matters because…”

I nearly started reviewing these sounds using generic computer game Status Reports descriptions, (primarily, Koji Kondo-led Super Nintendo sounds). My paragraphs would’ve been threaded through with: you’re-running-out-of-life, miniboss, reload-*RE*LOAD!, ice/water/fire/earth level, etc. Which would allow me to freeze the dangerous elements in music in a frame of nostalgia like an old UK number plate. I thought that was risky, though. Reducing a current music down into gates and fences, inanimate memories of past, stilled fans - where (of course) the fan has a Super Mario print-motif - grafting onto this mobile component. So that’s why there’s none of that in here, though if I’m being concessionary, the little hipwiggle synth bit of (7th track) “You Dot, Me Dot, T-Dot”?, like Mario poppin’ coins in his pocket.

Now. It’s important that I end by talking a bit about “The Plight of the Flightless Bird” (9th track) - only for me though. I used to marvel at the way the sky sometimes forgot to fill its whole self up and used to leave little pock-marks of pure space shining through. And some nights it’d remember right enough and there it’d be: the whole sky minus its dot-to-dot-forgotten-filling. I was only young. Young enough to make this convincing. And when the whole sky (thick as a smore of snow) descended, every sound would be like it traveled three days to reach you, like it was from a room next door. This was just a trick of the stubborn air, a conspiracy of pressures, though. Complete, sparse… and thick as haar.