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.
January Blue – Sha La La
There is a particular kind of pop song that arrives dressed as a day at the beach while quietly carrying a bag of knives. "Sha La La", the new single from Wellington's January Blue, is one of the very best of the type I've heard in a long while.
sheldon mashugana – It’s Turkey Day
Pop music has spent a century singing about love, heartbreak, revolution and the open road, and has somehow never found time for the fourth Thursday in November. Sheldon Mashugana, a Dallas comedian wearing round black glasses, a mop of lacquered hair and the manic grin of a man who has just been told the pub is open all night, has noticed the omission and fixed it. "It's Turkey Day" is billed as the first song ever dedicated to the actual day of Thanksgiving. I can't verify that claim, but I can't think of a rival either, and in rock and roll the first man through the door is usually the one who gets the glory.
Neon Diffraction – Stay a While
Drum & bass has always been a music of motion, a genre that hurtles toward the horizon at 174 beats per minute and rarely looks back. Stay still in the middle of it and you feel the floor move. So it is a small act of rebellion that "Stay a While" asks you to linger, and a larger one that it gets you to agree.
Shortout Kid – Lamb
Somewhere in a cramped workshop, a man has spent the better part of fifteen years coaxing a monster into existence. The razor belt, part chainsaw and part electric guitar, sounds like the sort of contraption a sensible person would keep away from the neighbours. Shortout Kid has instead kept it close, tuned it, tamed it, and now unleashed it on "Lamb", the first proper calling card from his forthcoming debut album. It is a gloriously unreasonable record, and it is better than it has any right to be.
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.
Johnny Ranck – Johnny Ranck EP
Park City, Utah is famous for ski lifts, film-festival lanyards and millionaires in expensive fleece. On paper it is not the sort of town that produces a man who sounds as if he has spent a fortnight in a pickup truck with a Buck Owens cassette and a flask of something unlicensed. Yet here is Johnny Ranck with his self-titled debut EP, and the paperwork turns out to be misleading.
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.