Mute U.S.
2008
Life Processes
About This Album
On Give Me a Wall, ¡Forward, Russia! sounded like a scrappier, even more earnest Bloc Party, setting their angst to sharp guitars and basslines that owed a heavy debt to post-punk. They wore their hearts on their collective sleeve, and on Life Processes, they do so even more literally and bombastically. Working with former Minus the Bear member and producer Matt Hughes (also responsible for twiddling knobs for Mastodon), the band sounds massive, and massively ambitious: "We Are Grey Matter"'s enormous buzzsaw riffs, vast keyboard expanses, and quicksilver rhythmic shifts make Give Me a Wall's prog and emo leanings explicit. ¡Forward, Russia! sound even more earnest and serious here than they did before, and singer Tom Woodhead's voice carries the brunt of that burden: he spends most of Life Processes singing with vocals scrunched up in a painful falsetto that may be an acquired taste, but leave no doubt that he really means what he is singing (whether or not listeners will glean much from lyrics like "April is dripping/A sponge soaked in mucus" is anyone's guess). There's also no doubt that the band's sound is surprisingly heavy on Life Processes, with the muscularity of "A Prospector Can Dream"'s metal-tinged guitars echoing the album's anatomical cover artwork.
Track List (try tracks 2,4,5 and 7)

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