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.
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.
Starboard to Sunset – Without You Here
Loss, in pop music, gets treated two ways: wallowed in until it curdles into self-pity, or so heavily varnished with hope that the wound never gets shown at all. Starboard to Sunset, a Jersey Shore outfit steered by singer-songwriter Tom Damiano, split the difference with a maturity that belies how straightforwardly the song is built. "Without You Here" doesn't dress up loss as triumph, nor does it drown in it. It simply sits with the ache, and trusts the listener to recognise it.
DALE – Addiction
Milan's dance-pop underground has a way of producing artists who arrive fully formed, and DALE belongs in that company. "Addiction," the second single pulled from a forthcoming record, is a small triumph of restraint married to instinct — a track that could easily have leaned on nostalgia and instead chose to build something stranger and more compelling.
Paul Garside – Mariana Trench
There's a particular kind of English melancholy that knows better than to wallow, and Paul Garside has bottled it rather beautifully on "Mariana Trench." This is a record that takes its title from the deepest, darkest, most crushing place on Earth and somehow turns it into a reason to punch the air. That paradox—darkness rendered as uplift—is the single's great trick, and Garside pulls it off with the sort of unforced conviction that can't be faked.
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.
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.
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.