Herewith the final four Russian items from the “No Name” or Addicted Label of Moscow run by Anton Kitaev. Arrived 11 May 2022.
The EP Das Ist Boris is a bit of an outlier in this noisy and abrasive crop – accessible, uptempo, instrumental rock music? Major keys? Melodic tunes? What’s going on? Evil Bear Boris turns out to be our friends from IWKC under another guise – at any rate the same members appear, and as a further clue IWKC made a record called Evil Bear Boris in 2015. Not a guitar anywhere on the whole record; even Artem Litvakovsky has laid down his bass in favour of the cello. The keyboards of Andrew Silin and Medved Boris are showcased instead, allowing them to shine with inventive figures and riffs, augmented by the brass section (French horn and trombone). What with the added violin and those cello stabs, we’re almost veering into “Chamber Rock” territory, but in the final balance it’s still very much driven by the flawless drumming of our man Nikita Samarin. The first two tracks, especially ‘Fight Club’, should win you over with their lively tempo and friendly disposition – when I say “friendly”, I mean being slapped on the back by a burly seven-foot bearded man who wants to buy you a drink and won’t take no – but the last track is more introspective and made ambiguous by its clever mixed chords. The cover image doesn’t actually convey much about this record, unless this is an average Russian’s idea of a hilarious visual joke.
After that moment of respite, back to obnoxious, horrifying and dense doom rock we now must go. Album is called Hydra and it’s credited to JWH, a four-piece of disaffected lads from Vladivostock who wear black hoodies and black T-shirts. Self-proclaimed “sludgecore” specialists since 2015, they formed with an avowed aim to make music that is “slowly rotten”. They deliver on that boast. Listen hard and you can not only hear, but sense in your very bones, the true stench of corruption and decay, as if the music itself were decomposing in slow motion. Actually JWH turn out to be a lot less stodgy and turgid than some other bands in this batch, and the gtr-bass-drum trio have found a way to deliver maximum punch to the mandibles while allowing plenty of space for Zakhar Pshenitsky and his unhinged vocal rants. He also writes the lyrics. I sense they might be steeped in despair and desperation for the entire human race, since their claim is “We present you the pain of people, who became prisoners of panel ziggurats, exhausting from the effects of psi waves.” This might easily translate as a critique of modern housing estates and their damaging effects on society, a worthy trope that’s been around in punk rock and industrial music for decades. Add to that, “Hydra” is also the name of an organised (and very successful) drug ring in Russia, and it’s possible that this whole album is an outspoken social diatribe railing against this grim situation. I’ll never know for sure, as all titles and lyrics are in Russian. But the lurid cover drawing tells a very articulate story. Just look at it!
Back to our good friends IWKC now with a four-track EP called Cargo Cult. This originally came out in 2016 as a file-based release but seems to have made the crossing into physical form. Curious listeners are advised to spin this as a taster before tackling the “big boy” Hladikarna – Cargo Cult is even more accessible and enjoyable, pushing the keyboard melodies to the fore, and once again showcasing the unusual instrumentation: cello, trumpet, trombone. Not only great fun, it might even be slightly humourous; at least that’s my takeaway from ‘Cho Blya?’, an eccentric ditty with its woozy, babbled vocals by Roman Karandaev. Other tracks on this tightly-produced release are mostly upbeat, jazz-inflected instrumentals, with less emphasis on the proggy histrionics; ‘Keine Angst’ is more like a soulful ballad tune. A good one.
Lastly…phew…we have The Universe Is An Ocean. Not Russian, this is another musical project from Budapest, and it’s a solo turn by Balázs Söptei. On this single 42-minute epic he plays everything, overdubbing synths, keyboards, guitars, bass, vocals and more to create his cosmological vision, influenced by those old lag English space cadets Pink Floyd as well as the American dronesters Earth and Sunn O))). “I am fascinated by cosmology and the unfathomable and complex nature of the Universe,” says Balázs, before proposing that the only way we can understand or grasp the unknowable forces at large is through use of metaphor. I’m with him so far – outer space themes, from Ligeti to Sun Ra and Tangerine Dream, are always welcome here, and any musician who deals in metaphor instead of tedious literalisms gets a drink from my canteen any day. Sadly The Universe Is An Ocean fails to achieve take-off from the launching pad for this listener, and is content to wallow aimlessly in its own slowly-rotating circular drones. The over-cluttered sound doesn’t bother me too much, but he needs to work a bit harder behind the mixing desk to get those mighty overamped axe sweeps to lift themselves out of the soupy quagmire he’s created. Sunn O))) may likewise deal in dense overloaded drones, but O’Malley has the studio skills that enable him to control and balance all the powerful forces which he unleashes. Balázs Söptei has another experimental project called Kajgūn, which likewise professes an interest in “improvisational metal music”. Today’s record was also released in America in 2021 on The Swamp Records. Back to mission control, men.