Do you know at least one Ukrainian punk rock band?
Do you know at least one Ukrainian punk rock band? Of course, no one asked me such a question, but I sometimes ask it to my friends. Talking about the glorious traditions of Ukrainian rock n roll, I don't want to miss punk itself. The first thing that comes to my mind is the band Borshch. Some people will say it's not punk rock, and maybe they're right. But musically and lyrically, Borshch has a spark that only lives in this style.
David Bowie’s first address
It remains interesting that even such alien rock stars as David Bowie had his parental home on our unfortunate planet. The future star lived the first 6 years of his life in 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, London.
Formation of the Ukrainian rock n roll scene
2022 has become too difficult for one of the largest countries in Europe. It is about Ukraine and its heroic people. The passing year has brought devastation and tears, pain and suffering to the country. In its fight against the invaders, Ukraine is choosing its freedom and the right to a democratic future. Today we wanted to remember the glorious past of this musical nation and especially, we are interested in the development of the rock scene in Ukraine, in a country with its ancient roots and culture. How it was and how it was born.
The story of one music video
One November morning, I went to the antique shop 'LOT ONE TEN'. I loved taking a walk in autumn London after a snack at McDonald's and a large serving of black coffee. I felt in good spirits and even the gray rain could not interfere with my daily ritual, so Walthamstow greeted me with genuine indifference, as if inviting me to take a walk on the favorite street of the designer William Morris, whose mansion-museum was around the corner.
Richy McLoughlin – A Will To Survive
There are songs that arrive pre-fortified with meaning, wrapped so tightly in their own significance that the listener barely gets a look in. And then there are songs like this — quiet, unguarded things that reach across the space between speaker and ear and make you feel, with some surprise, that you have been personally addressed.
K-Iai – Do & Don‘t
Pop music has always been a con trick, and the best practitioners know it. The trick is to make the artifice feel like truth, to dress the manufactured in the clothes of the inevitable, to convince you — three seconds into a chorus — that this song always existed and you simply hadn't heard it yet. K-Iai, emerging from the unlikely pop incubator of central Germany, understands this con deeply. *Do & Don't*, the project's debut single, doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is: a precision-engineered piece of dance-pop nostalgia with contemporary ambitions. The honesty, paradoxically, is rather refreshing.
Remora Beach – Tired Heart
Few things are as difficult to render honestly in song as the experience of loving too generously — of extending empathy like a hand that keeps getting bitten. Remora Beach, the Los Angeles project of a songwriter who records under the alias with the quiet ferocity of someone who has been through something and come out the other side still bewildered, doesn't just attempt it on "Tired Heart." He nails it to the wall.
Grainville Train – New Hand to Hold
The great country songs have always understood one fundamental truth about human longing: that we are most nakedly ourselves not in our moments of triumph, but in the quiet, trembling instant when we reach out toward another person and hope, desperately, that they reach back. Grainville Train, arriving with the kind of unhurried confidence that only genuine artistic conviction can manufacture, have grasped this with both hands — quite literally, given the sun-drenched romanticism of their artwork — and produced a single that deserves to be heard on wide open roads and in the small, bruised hours of the morning alike.
Judith Owen – Suit Yourself
The Welsh have always had a gift for the voice — it runs through them like coal seams through the valleys — but rarely does it arrive packaged quite like Judith Owen. Her fifth studio outing, recorded at New Orleans' Esplanade Studios and released through her own Twanky Records, is not merely an album. It is a reckoning. A gorgeous, swaggering declaration of musical selfhood from an artist who has spent the better part of two decades perfecting the alchemy of jazz, blues, and something altogether more difficult to name: pure, unguarded feeling.
Buildings and Food – Yutori
Patience is a political act. To sit still, to breathe, to resist the compulsion to fill every available second with productivity or noise — this is, depending on your disposition, either a profound spiritual discipline or a luxury most of us cannot afford. Jen K. Wilson, the Toronto-based artist and classically trained pianist who records as Buildings and Food, has built an entire album around this tension. *Yutori* — the Japanese philosophy of consciously cultivating spaciousness, of slowing down so that life might actually be lived — is not merely a concept record. It is a lesson administered gently, over eight tracks, with the patience of someone who has genuinely learned the thing they are teaching.
Russ Lorenson – A Little Travelin’ Music (20th Anniversary Edition)
The anniversary reissue is, as a genre, deeply suspect. Too often it arrives draped in the self-congratulatory padding of liner notes nobody reads and bonus tracks nobody asked for — a monument to commerce masquerading as a monument to art. Russ Lorenson, to his very considerable credit, has done something rather more interesting with the twentieth birthday of his debut album: he has actually gone back inside it.
Teto – About me and you
Love albums are the most treacherous terrain in popular music. For every Sea Change, a thousand earnest couples have sat across a kitchen table, acoustic guitars propped against the wall, and produced something so profumed with sincerity that it collapses under its own weight. Teto — the project of Jasper and Angel Nicolas, a husband-and-wife duo from Cainta, Rizal, in the Philippines — have every reason to fall into that trap. Twenty years of marriage. Four countries. A debut album named, with disarming literalness, About Me and You. And yet. And yet they don't.
Ron Morven – Paper Sun
Ron Morven arrives with little fanfare and considerable nerve. *Paper Sun*, his debut single, does not ease you in. It drops you, blinking, onto a Los Angeles freeway at the precise moment the heat becomes something more than weather — when the asphalt stops being infrastructure and starts being a psychological condition. That is a bold gambit for any debut, let alone one aimed squarely at dance floors and streaming playlists. Morven pulls it off with the confidence of someone who has been writing long enough to know that the gap between a mood and a song is smaller than most producers are willing to admit.
Agnes Fred – After Death
**There is a particular kind of silence that certain records understand better than words ever could. Agnes Fred's debut single inhabits that silence completely.**
Vela Jones – Static Air
Vela Jones arrives with the quiet confidence of someone who has already decided, long before anyone else caught on, exactly what kind of artist she intends to be. The cover art for *Static Air* tells you nearly everything you need to know before a single note sounds: a young woman, robed in flowing white lace, festooned with silver stars, boots planted firmly on a stage floor that glistens with fairy lights, holding an acoustic guitar decorated like a celestial map. She has named her artistic persona "space hippy," and the phrase is not merely decorative. It is a manifesto compressed into two words.
Leaone – Goodbyes & Goodtimes
The Suffolk caravan has not, historically speaking, enjoyed much of a reputation as a cradle of artistic genius. It tends to feature in English life as a punchline — a last resort, a parenthesis between better arrangements. Leaone, to his considerable credit, has turned his particular parenthesis into something rather extraordinary.