MARC ALMOND already has quite a track record. Even leaving aside his Soft Cell career, he's journeyed into far deeper cultural waters in the past with the likes of his French Chanson albums and covers of Jacques Brel songs. Besides, anyone who can collaborate with artists as diverse as Gene Pitney, PJ Proby, Foetus and Kelli Ali and only enhance his credibility is surely doing something right.
However, even if you've enjoyed such outings as these, little Almond has been involved in previously can prepare you for the sheer scope and ambition involved in bringing "Heart On Snow" - an album primarily of Russian folk, love and neo-classical songs - to fruition.
Recorded entirely in St.Petersburg with Russian producer and long-time Almond fan Misha Kucherenko as musical director and a whole host of heavyweight Russian collaborators, the album took all of two years to complete (a feat that deserves admiration in itself), but that the end results are so startling is a tribute to the talents of both men.
Admittedly, you need the ability to make a large sonic leap of faith with Almond here, but hang on in there, for "Heart On Snow" is largely very impressive and evocative, with the gamut of musical styles from folk to balalaikas to cabaret, jazz and classical well and truly run.
Besides, I can't think of any other western artist who's previously opened his album with a collaboration with the choir of the St.Petersburg Higher Naval Engineering Academy as Almond does here with the remarkable "So Long The Path(So Wide The Field)" : a kind of finest peasant worksong with breathtaking massed voices and an unsettling drone of strings.
Stirring stuff, and much of what follows is mostly of equally grand design. For instance, with Kucherenko's help, Almond has been able (singing in both Russian and English) to dip into amazing songbooks by the likes of Nikolai Gumflev and Vadim Kozin. The beautiful low-key ballad "Romance" features lyrics penned by Gumflev during the Russian Revolution and the fact he was killed by the Bolsheviks during the 1920s (and the song features the line: "poison blood is pouring out of you") only allows the song's unsettling loveliness to flow unabashed.
Almond also turns in sympathetic readings of two of Kozin's songs, "If Your Affectionate Smile Has Gone" and "Always And Forever". The former finds Marc dutting with Ilya Lagutenko (singer with Russian band Mumij Troll) and the lyrics sound well erotic whether they actually are or not, while "Always And Forever" is especally chilling when you consider its' author Kozin (a self-confessed homosexual when even acknowledgement was a criminal offence) refused to sing for Stalin and ended up living out his days in the Arctic city of Magadan in poverty even after surviving the Gulag.
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Elsewhere, Almond raises further ghosts with songs like the brilliant "The Storks": a dignified requiem for Russian soldiers lost during World War 2 (sample lyric: "No longer do they lie under the cold ground, but are white storks flying across the sky") with a fabulous orchestral arrangement worthy of Scott Walker himself.
There's much more, of course - not least his duets with Alla Bayanova, the dissident singer who survived the 1917 Revolution when still a tiny child, several journeys into gypsy balaliakas ("Two Guitars" and "Heart On Snow" itself) and two of Almond's own songs about Russia, of which "Gone But Not Forgotten" is especially memorable, if a little more modern in feel - but "Heart On Snow" is an incredible listen as a whole and an album that reveals more of its' innermost feelings the more you succumb to its' otherworldly thrills.
Initially, the idea of a Western singer tackling both the centuries old Russian tradition and the daunting language itself might seem as austere and unforgiving as the Siberian winter itself, but "Heart On Snow" is a far-reaching, and entirely commendable album which ultimately deserves to be viewed in the same cross-cultural sphere as records as influential as Ry Cooder's "Buena Vista Social Club" and Billy Bragg and Wilco's "Mermaid Avenue" project.
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