Hall of Ukrainian Rock’n’Roll
In our traditional support of the Ukrainian rock scene, we would like to offer you a story about a remarkable event that took place in western Ukraine in the small town of Manevychi. Every year, at the end of May, all the world's museums hold a night at the museum, and such a night took place in Manevychi, where at the same time the soft opening of the first hall of the future Rock Capital museum took place. The hall is called The History of Ukrainian Rock and Roll and is the first of seven planned halls of the Rock Capital Museum. Perhaps it would not have been so attractive if the Rock Capital Museum had not truly been the first rock museum in Ukraine.
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.
Noah Bates – For You
Brisbane has never been shy about producing artists who sound like they belong somewhere much bigger, and Noah Bates has just handed the city its most confident case yet. "For You" doesn't so much arrive as detonate — a single built from the wreckage of certainty, dressed in gated drums and synths that shimmer like they've been dipped in hairspray and neon.
Eric Osterhout – Green Eyed Angel
Texas has produced its share of cautionary tales set to a two-step rhythm, but few arrive with the clear-eyed candour Eric Osterhout brings to "Green Eyed Angel." This is a song that knows exactly what it is doing to you before you do, and that self-awareness is precisely what elevates it above the standard country confessional.
A Project Called Love – Chicago
Jay Hope has spent his career refusing to pick a lane, and on "Chicago" he finally proves the wandering was worth it. This is a songwriter who grew up on the banks of the Rhine, relocated to the sun-bleached sprawl of Venice, California, and somehow arrived at a sound that owes as much debt to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones' horn-driven swagger as it does to the feral howl of Kurt Cobain. On paper that combination shouldn't hold together for three minutes, let alone a whole single. On record, it swaggers.
Disco Dreams – OutLands
Synthwave has spent a decade eating its own tail, recycling the same neon-drenched nostalgia until the genre started to feel like a museum piece rather than a living pulse. Disco Dreams' "OutLands" arrives like a crack of static through that stagnant airwave — a track that knows the rulebook intimately enough to tear pages out of it.
Daye Jack – Preacherman and The Praise Team
Redemption stories are cheap in pop music. Everybody claims one, and most of them boil down to a stint in rehab and a new haircut. Daye Jack's version is stranger and more interesting than that, and it shows in the grain of this record.
Evil Jake – Be My Ex-Girlfriend
Every band claims a story of sweat and underdog grit; Evil Jake happen to have earned theirs. Formed in New York City and fronted by guitarist and songwriter Mike Jacobs, this is a band that learned its trade the honest way — through overdriven amplifiers and rooms too small for the noise being made in them. Released on April 1, 2003, *Be My Ex-Girlfriend* remains the record that put them on the map, and two decades on it still sounds like a band with something to prove and the chops to prove it.
Paper Nova – Black Whole
Four musicians who met over a decade ago in New York's tangled club circuit have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.
CMD.EXE – Red Giant Protocol
There's a particular kind of nerve required to open an album with the phrase "isolated signal emerging from darkness" and mean it literally. CMD.EXE — the Tucson-born dark-electronic project that has spent two albums now blurring the line between human and machine consciousness — possess that nerve in spades. *Red Giant Protocol*, their second full-length, is fifty-eight minutes of confident, cinematic overreach, and remarkably, it mostly earns it.
Syna Awel – Acoustic Live Session
Twenty-nine minutes, one afternoon, four musicians and a voice that refuses to be tidied up: that's the whole conceit of Syna Awel's Live Acoustic Session, and it turns out to be plenty. Strip away the studio gloss from a record and you usually find out fairly quickly whether the songs were ever more than production. Here, the opposite happens. "Isem-is Amazigh" opens the set sounding less like a performance than a summons — Mahir Bostandzija's percussion arriving like a heartbeat remembered rather than counted, Anis Agrebi's oud curling around Syna Awel's phrasing the way smoke curls around a lamp. You sense immediately that nothing on this session was rehearsed into submission.
Laji George – Sittin Here Thinkin
Grunge, as a genre, has spent the better part of three decades ossifying into cliché — flannel, feedback, and the same four chords borrowed wholesale from Seattle and worn thin by imitators who mistook volume for feeling. Laji George, to his considerable credit, has no interest in that museum piece. "Sittin' Here Thinkin'," the latest single from his forthcoming record *Out of Line*, takes the bones of that sound and grafts onto them something stranger and warmer: soul phrasing lifted from Otis Redding, the rasp and swagger of Chuck Berry's rock and roll, and — improbably, gloriously — an accordion, wheezing away underneath the distortion like it wandered in from a French dockside bar and decided to stay.
JF Roy – Sundress
Pop songs about happiness are notoriously difficult to pull off. Misery hands a songwriter automatic gravitas; contentment forces them to earn the listener's attention through craft alone, with no shortcut through shared wreckage. JF Roy, a Canadian singer-songwriter better known until now for rock built on faith and struggle, has wandered into this trickier territory with "Sundress," and come out the other side with something genuinely disarming: a love song that refuses to manufacture conflict it doesn't feel.
OpCritical – Parachute
Rock and roll has always had a soft spot for the grand gesture — the three-minute sermon dressed up as a single, the chorus built to be bellowed back at the band from a festival field. OpCritical understands this instinctively, and "Parachute" arrives as their most fully-formed statement yet: a song that takes the oldest trick in the songwriting book — turn a physical object into a metaphor and don't let go of it — and executes it with the kind of conviction that makes cynicism feel like a wasted effort.