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.
Dan Webb – Things Rise and Fall (feat. Logan Kane)
Psychedelic jazz-rock fusion is a genre tag that tends to promise more than it delivers, a shorthand for noodling indulgence dressed up in kaftans and reverb. Dan Webb, mercifully, ignores the tag entirely and just gets on with the business of making something genuinely strange and genuinely good.
Paul Martin – A Beautiful Thing
Folk-rock built for optimists doesn't come along often enough, and when it does, it tends to arrive wrapped in irony, as if genuine cheerfulness were somehow embarrassing. Paul Martin refuses that particular hedge. On "A Beautiful Thing," the New Zealand songwriter commits fully to warmth, and the record is all the sturdier for it.
The Myth Pool – In It Together
A debut single that arrives already knowing what it wants to be is a rarer thing than the industry likes to admit, and "In It Together" carries itself with exactly that kind of quiet certainty. Behind the name sit two musicians, Amie Penwell and Vicente Rodriguez, who met nine years ago at a benefit concert and only recently decided to make something together rather than in service of somebody else's vision. Penwell had already released a full album and an EP through the conventional studio route, chasing a producer's clock. Rodriguez had spent years as a session drummer, most notably behind Chuck Prophet, paid to find the fastest right answer rather than the truest one. What they've built together sounds like two people finally allowed to work at their own pace, and it shows.
DAPS – Down wit dat (cold killa)
Cobbs Creek gets a proper song this month, and Philadelphia's West Side finally has the chronicler it deserves. DAPS arrives on "Down wit dat (cold killa)" sounding less like a newcomer angling for attention and more like a man settling an old score with his own neighbourhood — writing it down before anyone else gets the chance to flatten it into cliché.
Steve Montgomery – Living The Dream Right Now
Rock and roll doesn't need reinventing this year — not when a BC guitar man with two decades of mileage under his belt can plug in, count off, and remind everyone why the format never needed fixing in the first place. *Living the Dream Right Now* is Steve Montgomery's ninth studio outing under the SkipRock Music banner, and it lands like a bar-room encore: sweaty, grinning, and utterly unbothered by fashion.
Chameleous – Wicked Din
Some records announce a band. Others confess one. *Wicked Din*, the debut full-length from Knoxville's ChameleouS, does both at once, and it does so with a patience that younger acts simply do not possess — because, as it turns out, this band isn't young at all. Frontman Mac Bartine has been sitting on these eight songs since the late nineties, and you can hear the sediment. This is music that has been rained on, dried out, rewritten, and rained on again. It has weather in it.
Peter Xifaras – Suite Lady Greensleeves
Composers who take on "Greensleeves" invite an unenviable comparison: the tune has been arranged, pillaged, sentimentalised and simplified so thoroughly across four centuries that fresh treatment risks sounding either reverent to the point of dullness or clever to the point of self-parody. Peter Xifaras avoids both traps with a confidence that borders on cheek. Rather than treating the melody as a museum piece to be dusted off and displayed, he dismantles it, scatters the fragments across eight movements, and lets a genuine narrative — courtship, hesitation, longing, refusal — carry the listening experience from start to finish.
We Told You So – A New Frame of Mind
Trois-Rivières isn't exactly punk rock's ancestral home, but Jim Giguère and his band of scarred romantics have spent a decade proving that geography means nothing when the songs are honest enough. *A New Frame of Mind* arrives not as a victory lap but as a confession booth with a Marshall stack bolted to the door, and it's the finest thing this outfit has committed to tape.
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.