It’s almost too easy to call Leeds foursome Forward, Russia! the New Kids on the Bloc Party: From the slashing one-note guitar lines, ceaseless rhythmic momentum, panicked vocal delivery, and the Soviet signifiers in both bands’ names, they dare you not to compare. But Forward, Russia! take their glasnost-algia even further, assigning their songs numbers instead of titles to represent the order in which they were written. It’s a tactic that seems to echo communism’s sublimation of the individual in favour of institutions, and the emphasis on process over product, because actual titles are clearly a bourgeois construct.
The numbers game should also shed some light on the band’s evolutionary arc, but the songs on Give Me a Wall (aka songs “Seven” through “Nineteen”, minus numbers “Eight", “Ten”, and “Fourteen”) are so unvaryingly anxious, that even when you sequence the album numerically in your iTunes, it’s difficult to make any definitive conclusions about Forward Russia!’s creative trajectory. “Seven” is plaintive Orange Juicey scrap-pop; “Eleven” introduces pile-driving riffage and quiet proggy passages that betray an affinity for the At the Drive-In/Refused school of post-hardcore; “Fifteen” is an inexplicably successful marriage between nu-metal aggression and new-romantic balladry that’s so dramatic, the band need to break it up into two parts. But with “Seventeen”, Forward Russia! revert to writing pogo anthems for campus communist-party student mixers, while on “Eighteen” they go reggae and on “Nineteen” they go “Heart of Glass”, because all new-wave-indebted bands have to, eventually.
This random survey may suggest a lack of focus, but Forward Russia! deploy all of their slight stylistic shifts within a very rigid and very familiar post-punk schematic: by the end of Give Me a Wall, you’ll want to strip the lug nuts off of drummer Katie Nicholls’ hi-hat, simply to force her out of 4/4 time. And though frontman Tom Woodhead possesses an impressive, full-bodied bellow-- not so much Robert Smith by way of Kele Okerke as a young Julian Cope by way of the Wilderness’ James Johnson-- it too becomes exhausting through overuse. But Woodhead's ability to hit the high notes with ease and finesse (as on the soaring choruses on “Nine” and “Fifteen”) suggests that he’s selling himself short with the standard staccato-shriek shtick. Give Me a Wall gives many clues but few definitive answers about where Forward Russia! are heading-- but the important thing for now is that they keep on moving.
