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.
Joe Rian – Think Yer In Luv
Joe Rian has been serving Chicago's music scene from behind the bar as much as from behind the microphone, and "Think Yer In Luv" plays like a man who has finally stepped out from behind the taps to claim the spotlight for himself. Given his history—pulling pints and clearing tables at Buddy Guy's Legends and The Moosehead while cutting his teeth with The Additives—it makes sense that the record sounds less like a studio confection and more like something poured straight from the tap: full-bodied, a little foamy at the edges, and built to be enjoyed in company.
Fanny Alexandra – Crown of Glass
Pop culture has never been short of pageant queens, but Fanny Alexandra's new single treats the archetype less as costume and more as diagnosis. "Crown of Glass" arrives on 14 August as a cinematic slab of alternative rock, and it wears its ambition proudly — this is a song that wants to say something about the machinery of admiration, and largely gets away with it.
Teanko – Between Two Selves
Retirement songs have a bad habit of curdling into either smugness or elegy: the victory lap or the wake. Teanko sidesteps both traps with a single that feels less like a farewell tour and more like a hand reaching across decades to shake its own.
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.
Mark Cee – Ghost Talk Show
Some records announce themselves. This one just switches the lamp on and starts talking, and you find yourself leaning in before you've decided to.
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.
DIE DIE BE – Erased Faces
Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.
Terra Nai – Foliada de Berducido
Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.
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.