Ruts DC – ELECTRacoustic Volume 3

‘You can’t kill a good song‘, says the adage. Anyone who has heard Kim Wilde‘s take on Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve Fallen In Love With)? will be clamouring to disagree. However, as Ruts DC have proved with the two previous volumes using this stripped down, mostly unplugged methodology, it’s an adage with a vital underlying truth and we’ll have to accept that the exception proves the rule in Kim‘s case.

For Ruts DC, the past is not a lazy river. It is a pool. The tensions prevalent in the broken society that prevailed when Ruts were originally on the up still boil under the surface. That’s why the mirror held up to society by The Crack album in 1979 is the same mirror that brought us 2022’s Counterculture? And everything in between in The Ruts / Ruts DC universe. And that is why these ELECTRacoustic albums work so brilliantly: it is the songs that shine on brightly and the new vitality this stripped back methodology gives them negates any possibility that this might have ended up a misty-eyed nostalgia trip. It isn’t.

This third volume, as the two before, absolutely works as a fresh piece. Yes, the songs were forged in different eras and if anything, these refreshed, revitalised versions of songs such as Jah War, Human Punk, Dope For Guns et al should lead the Ruts-curious back to those seminal recordings. But they are no more or less valid than Vox Teardrop from the Music Must Destroy album or Too Much from the Counterculture? It is Pretty Lunatics from that album that captures the essence of unplugged method perfectly. Its gently rolling All Apologies prettiness cushions an excoriating critique of shallow influencer culture. It is this track that sums up the ELECTRacoustic approach perfectly – don’t be fooled by the soft velvet glove because the revolutionary fist is still steel hard inside it.

This is a band that has neither recreated itself nor sought cheap publicity to restore former glories. They simply were. And have been. And will continue to be. And the band has seen it all, fought all the culture wars from the musical frontline and remained true to their vision. While there will always be some hankering for a hologrammic version of the original Ruts line-up from back in the day, there was never a plan to replace Malcolm Owen and Paul Fox (the latter one of punk’s great under-celebrated guitar heroes). There never needed to be. The canon remains, the band endure and are as vital and important as ever. To prove the point, there is a new song Bound In Blood crafted for this album with the ELECTRacoustic vibe in mind of which Segs says: “Acoustic versions of full band songs are one thing, but starting a song acoustically sets up a whole different intention. ‘In A Rut’ was actually like that and ‘Bound In Blood’ is the same so it all makes sense really.”

Ruts DC are on the road with the ELECTRacoustic set. Catch them if you can. As anyone who has seen this iteration at Rebellion Festival or elsewhere already knows, it’s an experience quite unlike anything much on the punk circuit right now.

ELECTRacoustic volumes 1, 2 & 3 are available here