NRP: Razorcuts – The World Keeps Turning

Its been a while since I’ve gotten to dig into a Necessary Repress, but the list is long and heavy. For a refresher, the series aims to look at releases that have been left out of the vinyl boom and the constant savaging for every conceivable pop artifact to put back into circulation. This usually comes to a head around Record Store Day when labels look at rosters for any item they can cannibalize back into the market, without thinking about how necessary represses of best of compilations and unloved singles truly are. That’s not to say that there aren’t deserving corners of the market still left out of the spotlight, though. Its just never the ones you love, is it? In that regard, I submit the catalog of C86 / Creation alums Razorcuts, and more specifically, their excellent sophomore album The World Keeps Turning.



The band centered around the work of Gregory Webster and Tim Vass. The two created the band following their work together in The Cinematics. The duo would also rope in Peter Momtchiloff who’d go on to play with Heavenly. The band’s early EPs found their way out on the Bristol label Subway Organization in ’86. The label had a pretty strong foothold into the world that would come to be definted by the C86 comp, issuing releases by contemporaries The Flatmates, The Chesterfields (whose Kettle could also be included in this series), The Soup Dragons, and Shop Assistants. The label issued Razorcuts’ Big Pink Cake single along with a split with underrated jangle heroes The Wolfhounds. The next year they’d branch out and issue an EP with Flying Nun UK and a split with Talulah Gosh all culminating in a deal with Creation and their debut Storyteller.

The foundation laid by Storyteller was built upon for the following year’s The World Keeps Turning, the band’s most polished release. Even with a coat of polish they still had a shaky, homespun earnestness that puts them in league with Felt and The Loft. There’s something in their bittersweet jangle-pop that’s a little more grey-skied than the usual fare and its hard not to be charmed by their records. The band would sadly part ways after the World was issued with Vass moving on to Red Chair Fadeaway and Webster forming the bands The Carousel and Saturn V. Fates did bring the two back together one last time, though as Forever People in a one off for Sarah Records. The album is more than deserving of the wax treatment and the plea for reissue isn’t completely unheard. Both LPs were given cassette issues by Captured Tracks a while back, but still these jangles ache for the warm embrace of vinyl again.

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