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.
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.
Sasc classical – Clair de lune
Debussy's "Clair de lune" began life, around 1890, under a different name. *Promenade sentimentale* was the title of the movement, the third of the *Suite bergamasque*, and the composer sat on it for some fifteen years before letting it reach print in 1905. The more famous title comes from Verlaine, whose masked revellers dance sadly beneath the moon, singing in a minor key of love and a life they do not quite believe in. Debussy's gift was to catch that doubleness, joy and sorrow braided together, without a single word. Sasc Classical's new single, produced by SoloArtStudio, sets out to honour that gift, and does so with a sincerity that disarms.
37 Houses – Jealous Love (Live)
Nobody should be allowed to be this unguarded in public, and yet here is Erin Sydney, in a Chicago club in July, taking a song about marital jealousy and singing it as though the roof is already on fire and she's the only one who's noticed. "Jealous Love (Live)", lifted from the forthcoming *Live in Chicago* EP, is a rock record in the oldest and least fashionable sense: a few people, loud amplifiers, and an emotional situation that cannot be resolved by anything short of volume.
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.
Hurb Jephasun – In The End
Hurb Jephasun has taken roughly four decades to release a record this good, and the wait was worth it. *In The End* is a four-track EP that sounds as though it was recorded in the one room where nobody was lying. The microphone is open and the walls are listening. You hear a chair creak, a breath drawn before a line, a voice fraying at the exact word where fraying is the only honest option.
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.
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.