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.
Lisac – Nobody Asked You
Nobody enjoys being told how to live, and almost nobody is told only once. Unsolicited opinion arrives in relays: the raised eyebrow across the dinner table, the "just saying" that is never just saying, the acquaintance with firm views on your choices. Lisac's "Nobody Asked You" takes this most ordinary of irritations and elevates it to art without raising its voice once.
AVRION – Free
Breakups are rarely as tidy as pop songs pretend. They fray, and they linger in the hallway with one arm in a coat, unsure whether to leave. The most interesting thing a dance record can do with that limbo is stay in it long enough to be honest, then open a window. That is the trick AVRION pulls off on *Free*, the second single from an independent producer who builds a catalogue with more patience than the genre's louder names can manage.
Noel Johnson NDJ – Lord Look After Me
Gospel music has always known that the most interesting hour of the soul is the one before the miracle. Noel Johnson NDJ, a one-man congregation from Birmingham (the American one), has built a single around that hour. It is a hymn sung by someone unsure the hymn will be answered, and it is a fine, unsettling piece of work.
Stephani Ezatoff – Run On
Nashville's Music Row has a habit of swallowing careers, and lately it has been swallowing buildings too. The Sound Shop, a room where Brenda Lee, Dolly Parton and Eddy Arnold once left fingerprints on the air, shut its doors for good and met the wrecking ball within days of Stephani Ezatoff finishing her session there. She cut "Run On" in the studio's last gasp, and the single carries the faint whiff of a séance: a woman summoning a very old song inside a very old room while the demolition crew waits at the kerb.
Alexander Nantschev – Half A Century
Most musicians pick an apartment and furnish it. Alexander Nantschev has spent more than forty years on the balcony between two. At one end, in a Vienna flat, his father, the violinist and instrument dealer Nikolaj, kept Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Schoenberg in the air. At the other, his brother's studio hummed with synthesizers, samplers, tape machines and Beatles records. The boy who wandered between them fell hard for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Within You Without You", two songs in which pop first dared to lie down on a Persian rug and wonder what else the orchestra might be hiding. That balcony is the architecture of his new album, and he still hasn't chosen a side.
The Timbre Project – Bass River Sessions
Records made by friends in a room tend to sound either like a warm hug or a hostage negotiation. *Bass River Sessions*, cut over several sittings on a Massachusetts street and named for it, sounds like three men who have spent years arguing productively about guitars finally being allowed to leave the amps switched on.
Kat Button – Relabel
Pop has always known that the dancefloor is the best place to cry. New Order knew it, the Pet Shop Boys built a career on it, and Robyn made it an emotional philosophy. On *Relabel*, her second album, Southampton's Kat Button joins that lineage with ten tracks that are danceable and disarmingly honest. Very little EDM has attempted what she does here, and the record is better for it.
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.
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.