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.
Pete Keating and The Renslow Trestle – Louder
Seattle guards its reputation jealously, and that reputation was not built on good manners. London Bridge Studios still seems to hum with Mother Love Bone's swagger, Soundgarden's thunder and Pearl Jam's ten-ton yearning. Booking the room takes nerve, and walking out with a song that amounts to a firm handshake and a sturdy pair of boots takes more. Pete Keating has that nerve. "Louder" uses the room's hallowed acoustics to make a point rather than a racket.
CAR287 – End Of The Day
Three minutes and eleven seconds: that is the whole of the ask, and Winnipeg's CAR287 spend every one of them as though the bar were closing and the jukebox had one coin left. Among streaming-age running times that bloat and songs that outstay their welcome, "End Of The Day" amounts to a public service.
franxie – Stone
Ten years is a long time to carry a song around. Most of us can't keep a gym membership going for ten months. Yet Franxie, the Wollongong singer-songwriter and producer, has hauled "Stone" through nearly a decade of gigs, voice memos and abandoned demos, and the wait has done what waiting rarely does. It has ripened the song rather than staled it.
Laji George – Washed Away
Heartbreak is rock'n'roll's most reliable landlord. It collects the rent in bruises and never stops knocking. Laji George, a New Yorker who has spent years fronting the alt-rock band Pseutopia, now steps out alone with *Out of Line*, his debut solo album. Its lead calling card, "Washed Away", takes the oldest wound in the book and asks the question Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry posed in *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*. If you could delete the person you loved and the grief along with them, would you?
Reetoxa – Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars)
Paul McCartney woke with "Yesterday" fully formed and spent weeks canvassing the music business in case he had nicked it. Jason Mckee, the Melbourne singer-songwriter who records as Reetoxa, has a stranger claim on the dream-song tradition, and a heavier price attached to it. The first of these two tracks arrived in a prison bunk in 2017, weeks after his mother's death, delivered by a vision of two floating heads. One was his mother's. The other belonged to a daughter lost before birth, who wanted to know why nobody was looking after her in a place called Akaroa. He had never heard of it. He wrote it down phonetically, picked up his guitar, and was told through the cell door, with some vigour, to shut up.
Niel Lian – Resilience in a World on Fire
Solo piano records now arrive by the thousand, most of them built to sit politely behind a spreadsheet or a sleeping child. The default setting of the genre is a pleasant fog: a few unhurried chords, a wash of reverb, a title that hints at rain. Niel Lian's debut album declines the fog. It is quiet, and it keeps its voice low, but it wants to be listened to rather than tolerated. It repays that attention with something rarer than prettiness: the sense of a mind at work.
Fabian Starr – Eternal Loop
Concept albums usually arrive draped in a cape, with a gatefold sleeve the size of a paving slab and a sleeve note that reads like a tax return. Fabian Starr shows up in wraparound shades that glow the blue of a science-fiction fridge, a leather jacket zipped to the chin, and an infinity symbol lit on his chest like a warning light on the dashboard of eternity. The cover says he is doing this, and that he won't be apologising.
Fish And Scale – Elf
The compilation album has a shabby reputation, and usually deserves it: a hurried shuffle of old favourites, a couple of scraps to tempt the completists, a contractual obligation with a sleeve. *Elf* is a different animal. Its title is German for "eleven", the number of tracks Roland Wälzlein, who records as Fish And Scale, has chosen from his musical journey so far and set beside brand-new pieces. He has hung them the way a good curator hangs a retrospective, so the older work looks freshly lit and the new work looks as though it has always lived there. The result is cohesive, atmospheric and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather wonderful.
TrixxStarr – Enough
Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.
Peter Melodist – Fear
Thirteen is an odd age to hand someone a guitar-shaped microphone and ask them to say something true. Most who try it hide behind borrowed phrases, safe choruses, the sound of an artist rehearsing adulthood rather than living inside it. Peter Melodist does something more interesting on "Fear": he sounds like a kid who has already worked out that rock music was invented for exactly this — for turning the unnameable stuff in your chest into something you can play loud.
Gravité Fresq – Hypocracy Loop
Dublin's Gravite Fresq has built a reputation on turning private dread into something you can dance to, and "Hypocrisy Loophole" is the sharpest weapon in that arsenal yet. It arrives clad in synthetic armour — a rigid, pulsating bassline that sounds machined rather than played, married to a four-on-the-floor drum pattern so unyielding it borders on liturgical. Fitting, given the subject matter.
Underlowe – No Pictures
There's a particular kind of racket that only comes from a band who've spent five years getting to know each other's bad habits before they ever plugged in together properly, and "No Pictures" — the new shot fired by Cardiff's Underlowe — has that racket in spades. This is a record built on trust, on the kind of shorthand that only exists between old friends and older riffs, and it announces itself with the confidence of a band who know exactly what they're doing, even if the world hasn't quite caught up yet.