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.
zukrassverliebt – Sensory Overload
The Pet Shop Boys made loneliness sound like a ticker-tape parade, and Donna Summer made desire sound like a medical emergency. Now zukrassverliebt takes the most contemporary of low-grade miseries, the feeling of a brain with forty tabs open and no idea which one is playing music, and turns it into a dance-pop single that you can't switch off. That is the cruel joke at the heart of "Sensory Overload", and it's a very good one.
Frank Joshua – Made For Me
Pop music has always been a time-travel business. Songs get written in one decade, heard in another, and loved in a third. Frank Joshua has taken the longest route I can remember. He wrote "Made For Me" at nineteen, put it in a drawer for more than four decades, and has finally let it out into a world that has had plenty of time to grow cynical. The remarkable thing is that the song hasn't aged a day.
Kasper – Give and take
Love songs usually come in two flavours: the swooning and the sneering. Kasper's "Give and Take" refuses both and sits down at the kitchen table instead, where most real relationships are won, lost and quietly renegotiated. It is a duet in spirit if not in form, a conversation between two people who have not stopped loving each other but have somehow stopped listening. It is also one of the more grown-up pop songs to wander into earshot this year.
Roger K – Alter Ego
Garage has always been music for people pretending to be fine. The two-step shuffle was made for a Friday night in your best shirt, hips swinging, heart quietly negotiating with itself. Roger K, an independent artist from Victoria, Australia, has noticed this and built a whole single around it. "Alter Ego" is a garage record about the exact moment the front you've been holding up for the room stops holding.
The House Flies – Lions and Ore
Post-punk has spent decades learning to dress for funerals, and most of its apprentices have mastered the black clothes and forgotten the grief. The House Flies, from Moline, Illinois, remember the grief. *Lions and Ore*, their second full-length, is a record of rooms with the lights off and fields shimmering in the heat, of sleep that won't quite arrive and objects abandoned by people who meant to come back. It was recorded in vocalist and guitarist Alex Riggen's basement, which explains the closeness, the sense of songs pressed against the walls, and also the ambition, because the walls have clearly been asked to hold more than they were built for.
Wildcard Campfire – Where God Grew Tired
Debut albums from faceless projects usually arrive with a smoke machine and little else. *Where God Grew Tired* turns up with a cosmology. Over ten tracks and fifty-five minutes, Wildcard Campfire, the vehicle of writer and creative director Rom Burla, builds a whole fallen civilisation: a promise curdles into doctrine, a rebellion hardens into war, and humanity crawls underground while something new grows over the ruins. Millennia later, the survivors come back clutching a warped memory of what they lost. It is a mad ambition for a first record, and the thing is how often it comes off.
Innocent Darkness – Hexen
Witch house was never supposed to grow old gracefully. It arrived around 2009 in a fog of triangle glyphs, chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, and cheap-hearted gothic theatre, then dispersed almost as quickly as it had gathered, leaving Salem, White Ring and a handful of others as its patron saints. So it is a small shock, and a gratifying one, to find the form turning up in Ekeren, a suburb of Antwerp, in the hands of a man who has lived in the same house for 55 years and has been spinning records since 1995. *Hexen* is his debut, released in October, and it is a wonder.
Katie Noir – The Aftermath EP
Calling a seventy-seven-minute, fifteen-track collection an "EP" is the first act of mischief on Katie Noir's second record. The second is releasing it less than three months after a twenty-three-song debut. A cynic would expect leftovers: B-sides, offcuts, the sound of an artist clearing the shed. *The Aftermath EP* is nothing of the kind. It is a sequel with a sharper pulse, written by someone who has just discovered that strangers can hear her.
Rusty Reid – Oh, What a World
Closing a double album is a gamble. Having kept the listener company across two discs of Texas songwriting, an artist must send them home without sentimentality or anticlimax. Rusty Reid's answer, on *Lone Stardust (Masterworks of Texas Songwriters)*, is to hand the last word to Kacey Musgraves, and to a song about wonder.
NBP Human – All my mind is on you
Regret is the most flattering light in pop. It softens every edge, gilds every doorway, and persuades us that the person who left was always the one. Most songs about it wallow. A rare few sit quietly in the dusk of the thing and simply look. NBP Human's "All My Mind Is on You" belongs to the second kind, and it is a lovely, unshowy piece of work.
More to Give – Popkanon, RarriQUESO, Jack Flash
A sufficient number of synthesisers can make almost any sentiment sound like a revelation, and pop has long confused grandeur with depth. "More to Give", the 22nd release from the Norwegian-Chicagoan songwriting trio Popkanon, arrives with a modesty that makes its ambitions all the more convincing. Credited alongside the Chicago Latin artist RarriQUESO and the producer Jack Flash, it is a song about stubbornness, the particular kind that survives a bad few years and still manages to look at a horizon without flinching.
TaniA Kyllikki – HUMAN
Songs that tell us how to feel about one another are never in short supply. Far rarer is one that simply asks, then trusts the listener to do the work. "HUMAN", the new single from British independent singer-songwriter TaniA Kyllikki, puts the question in its title, repeats it until it becomes a mantra, and wraps it in a dancefloor pulse that keeps the feet busy while the conscience catches up.