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.
Gianfranco Malorgio – Greaseball
Gianfranco Malorgio has handed himself a difficult brief. He has named his closing movement after a slur, the sort of word once hurled across a Lower East Side street at men who had just stepped off a boat with one suitcase and a cardboard-tagged coat. Plenty of composers would flinch. Malorgio takes the word, turns it over in his hands like a stone from a riverbed, and makes it sing.
Janalynn Castelino – But Without You (Temptation Remix)
The remix is a curious British pastime, and usually a cynical one. A song is dusted off, a four-on-the-floor kick is bolted underneath, and a perfectly decent confession ends up as wallpaper in a provincial nightclub. Janalynn Castelino's "But Without You (Temptation Remix)", released on 23 October, has no interest in that kind of vandalism. It treats its 2025 source material the way a good tailor treats a fine suit: nothing essential is cut away, but everything is taken in, sharpened and made to move.
Nate Todd – Rich Part of Town
Most protest songs are written at a desk by someone who has never been cold. Nate Todd wrote his while out jogging, a more honest method than it sounds. Leafy lanes, mansions loitering behind their hedges like retired aristocrats, and a few blocks back, human beings asleep on the pavement. Todd noticed, and then did what a decent man with a guitar should do. He plugged in.
Thousand Pieces – Hey Man. Amen.
Rock music has always been fond of the drunk as a romantic figure: the poet in the bar, the doomed charmer, the tragic hero with a bottle for a muse. Jamie Smith, working under the name Thousand Pieces, has no time for any of that. "Hey Man. Amen." belongs to the person standing at the other end of the story, the one who has made the phone calls, driven to the clinics, sat through the relapses and run out of ideas.
Music by Jeremy – Scenes from a Well Worn Path (Side Three)
Banbury has a cross, a cake and a motorway junction. It has never had a songwriter quite like this. Music by Jeremy, a solo artist who makes records at weekends while his partner chooses her shoes, has reached the third instalment of a 24-track autobiography. In Side Three, the memoir stops studying its own reflection and goes to the window to look at the weather.
Ray’s Music Exchange – A Live Family Rayunion
A reunion can go two ways. Either the old gang shuffle onstage, squint at one another through the stage lights and perform a well-meaning wake for their younger selves, or they plug in, count off and discover that thirty years of friendship is a splendid rhythm section in its own right. Ray's Music Exchange, happily, belong to the second camp. *A Live Family Rayunion 2025*, their first live recording in fifteen years, is a warm, rowdy and gloriously unbuttoned document of a band who still have plenty to say and a houseful of friends to say it with.
The Crystal Teardrop – Love Your More
Twelve months is a short time to follow a debut with a second album, and a shorter one still to make it better. The Crystal Teardrop have done both. *The Crystal Teardrop Is Forming* arrived last May as a handsome calling card for a band steeped in jangle and Paisley Underground fuzz. *Love You More* is the sound of that band after a year of motorway miles, sweaty stages and nightly proof that the thing works.
The Snow Ponies – Holding On
Every so often a record turns up that has no business existing, and is all the better for it. *Holding On*, the debut album from The Snow Ponies, was recorded over twelve months by one man in the Waikato, who played every instrument himself. That man is Phil Dean. His CV includes thirty-odd years of gigging, a guard's uniform in *Rings of Power*, a thumping from Jason Momoa in *Aquaman 2*, and a head injury that has left him unable to tolerate bright lights and loud noise. This is not the usual route to a good guitar record, and yet here it is.
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.
Watch Me Die Inside – Fantasy Girl
Johnny O.'s original is a love song of the old, certain kind, the sort that announces a girl and a destiny in the same breath and never stops to ask whether the girl has been consulted. Watch Me Die Inside, the Cyprus-based project orbiting the enigmatic figure of Aleph, takes that certainty and holds it up to the light until it starts to look like something else: a man talking to a mirror and calling it a woman.