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.
Weekday Social – So Close
Pop-punk has always been the music of bad decisions made at speed, and the genre's best songs know that regret can be made to sound like joy. Weekday Social, a London trio of Louise, Gavin and Ben, understand this thoroughly. "So Close," released last week, is a song about walking into a mistake with your eyes open, and the band sound delighted to be doing it.
Saša Miočić – Forgiveness
Saša Miočić spends his working life making other people's music sound magnificent, first as a producer and then as a live sound engineer. That is a strange apprenticeship for a solo debut, and it shows on "Forgiveness," the lead single from his fifteen-track album *Take What You Need*. This is a record made by someone who knows exactly what a kick drum does to a ribcage in a full room, and who has decided, with admirable perversity, to put that knowledge in the service of a grand piano.
DEHUSSLAR MUSIC – MOUTH 2 MOUTH
Anyone who has stumbled out of a festival field at midnight knows the peculiar loneliness that follows. The ringing ears, the trampled grass, the sudden hush of a taxi or a kitchen: it feels like a rude betrayal by the universe. Most of us respond by putting the kettle on and lying face-down on the sofa. DEHUSSLAR MUSIC, an Auckland producer with a bin-liner's worth of appetite for chaos, responded by opening his laptop at 3am and building a rave from scratch.
Defined By – Monopoly
Lancashire has a habit of producing bands who sound like they've been forged rather than formed, and Defined By slot neatly into that lineage with "Monopoly," a single that arrives less like a calling card and more like a clenched fist through the letterbox. Four musicians, freshly reconstituted, have spent the past couple of years road-testing this sound in rooms that matter more than their size suggests — Preston's Ferret, Burnley's Loom, a headline turn at Horwich's Ramp — and the graft shows. This is a band who've learned their craft on sticky floors rather than in spreadsheets, and "Monopoly" carries the calluses to prove it.
Ryan Yingst – A Nice Neighborhood to Have Bad Habits In
Raymond Chandler lent the title, from *The Big Sleep*, a line delivered with the sly relish of a man who knows exactly what the neighbourhood is going to cost him. Ryan Yingst, a folk singer from Hershey, Pennsylvania by way of a Pittsburgh jazz-guitar degree, a Nashville apprenticeship and, since late 2023, Philadelphia's gig circuit, has taken the joke and built six songs inside it. They are honest, handsome and quietly ruinous, and they are the finest thing he has put his name to.
C’batch – I Guess You Want It This Way
Two decades and six years is a peculiar gestation period for a pop song, longer than most marriages, longer than most careers. And yet C'batch's new EP wears its slow-cooked origins not as a burden but as a badge, the way a good stew tastes better for having sat on the hob since roughly the turn of the millennium.
Freidrich$ – Doll, Here I Am
Vulnerability, on record, usually arrives pre-packaged: a stripped-back arrangement, a whispered vocal, the implicit stage direction reading *sincerity now*. Freidrich$ has spent a career resisting that packaging, burying his voice under distortion and studio trickery as if flinching from his own confessions. Doll, Here I Am is the record where the flinching stops.
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.
Co.LeGa – you.Love
Digital romance has never sounded quite so uneasy, nor quite so danceable. "you.Love" arrives as the second salvo from Co.LeGa this year, and it lands with the poise of someone who has stopped worrying about whether electronic music can be both cerebral and physical, and simply gone ahead and made it both.
The Lazz – The Crown
Benjamin Lazzaro has spent four decades wielding a guitar, and it shows in the muscular confidence of "The Crown," the opening salvo of Act IV in his sprawling, Jungian-soaked concept saga. This is not a musician chasing trends; this is a craftsman who has finally built the machine capable of matching the scope of his imagination.
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.