Razorcuts

If you were lucky enough to know Razorcuts during their brief late '80s existence, they became inextricably entwined with your own everyday being. Their songs became your life and you heard your life in their songs. The Byrds without their undertow of wasted despair, Belle and Sebastian if they were too engaged in actually living to sit inside reading books - Razorcuts always sounded like the greatest summer of your life, three minutes at a time. Listening to R is for..., a 21-track collection of the group's recordings (largely drawn from their two sublime LPs for a then-burgeoning Creation Records), one can scarcely believe the songwriting partnership of Tim Vass and Gregory Webster was a product of such an aesthetically unforgiving era; but this too is why it now transcends it. "You have to remember that there was no large-scale crossover of guitar pop into the mainstream at that time," says Webster. "We never set out to change the face of pop music," adds Vass. "Our main aim was to make music that would mean something special to people like us; people with similar record collections and, perhaps, a similar worldview." If your worldview still grants you the ability to be awed by notions of romantic surrender ("Brighter Now," "Jade"), rare glimpses of unaffected beauty ("The World Keeps Turning") and the comfort of wilful naiveté ("Storyteller"), Razorcuts will mean as much to you as pop music ever could.