ПасхаБосха - "Postmusic" [1995]

Artist: ПасхаБосха

Title: Postmusic

Genre: Post-Punk, Analog Noise, No Wave

Country: Russia

Release date: 1995

Track List:

1. Fracas
2. Саломеи
3. Крест Чорт
4. NomineDomine
5. Молох
6. Deo Volente
7. Касть
8. Цитадель Всего 

Another project of Nikita Borisov, known for Христос Пантократор, Res Nullius and several other noise & industrial acts that existed in my city during mid-1990s. It bears many similarities with his other projects, but I find it much more interesting than, say, Res Nullius (which, for the most part, was just monotonous quitar noise). Lengthy atonal compositions, mostly instrumental, that strongly remind me of early Swans (and I won't be surprised if this album was inspired by krautrock and RIO as well). It's dark, but not really loud and not THAT noisy, so it might appeal to the fans of less experimental post-punk too. "Postmusic" is a quite lengthy release, but it isn't that hard to sit down though the whole album if you enjoy this kind of music. As for the name, it suits the sound quite well and reminds me of the times when the prefix "post-" wasn't as overused as it is nowadays.

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Христос Пантократор - "Theos" [1997]

Artist: Христос Пантократор

Title: Theos

Genre: Ritual Industrial, Noise

Country: Russia

Release date: 1997

Track List:

1. Апостол
2. Мёртвым
3. Идолатрие
4. Moirae
5. Крестный ход - Lex Aeterna
6. Кокон
7. Ничто - Темница - Цитадель
8. Астроном
9. Бог Дёрн 
10. Аист - Nomine

Христос Пантократор / Christ Pantocrator were the first ritual noise project from my city, started by Nikita Borisov and Nikolay Morar in summer 1994. The former also was the local pioneer of analog noise with his project Res Nulluis that was started in late 1992. They occasionally worked with other musicians (Mikhail Slepchenkov - guitar, Alena Bolotova - drums, Svetlana Sinyakina - vocals), but these were only short-time collaborations.

The band recorded several albums during their existence, but never performed live, mostly due to their "blasphemous" name and imagery. Their music wasn't received well back then, and they split up in spring 1997 after releasing their best album "Theos". Surely there are better ritual industrial acts out there, but this album offers a powerful "shamanic"/occult atmosphere and some fans of obscure ritual noise might find it interesting. Moreover, it's a valuable historical document from a place where the underground music scene was never particularly powerful (sadly...)

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Час Пик - "Рэп" [1984]

Artist: Час Пик

Title: Рэп

Genre: Rock'n'Roll, Funk, Old School Rap

Country: USSR

Release date: 1984

Track List:

1. Дискотека
2. Суббота
3. Рэп
4. Потанцуй
5. Проходит время

The average Soviet listener was first acquainted with rap (which, of course, was far from its current form back then) due to Sergey Minaev's 1987 album "Radio Abracadabra" and a tape compilation "Disco-7" released the same year. A more or less consistent Russian rap scene appeared only by 1991-92, but there was one act that recorded some rap with lyrics in Russian as early as in 1983.

It started in the city of Samara (Kuibyshev back then) which had a powerful disco movement led by quite open-minded people during 1982-86. Annual DJ competitions were held there, and one of the most prominent participants of these competitions was Alexander Astrov, a DJ at a disco called "Canon". In 1983, he got his hands on a 7'' by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - one of the leading hip-hop acts of that time, and the "Wot!" EP by Captain Sensible. It left a big impression on him, and after doing a research on hip-hop culture he decided to do a rap-style disco program for the next DJ competition. In addition to his DJ activities, he was a soundman for a local rock band "Час Пик" ("Peak Hour"), with whose members he recorded a 25 minutes long disco program during one night before the annual DJ competition in 1983.

Among the members of the jury was Olga Opryatnaya, an employee of the USSR Ministry of Culture who'd later become a manager of the famous Moscow Rock Laboratory. After the performance, she asked Astrov for the recording, which was handed to her and returned to the musicians of "Час Пик" an year later as a proper mini album, titled simply "Rap", which made a sensation in the underground rock circles of Moscow. It slighly shocked them because no one of them took it seriously when it was recorded. Of course it sounds quite naive nowadays, but 30 years ago it was a breakthough release. The video above contains the whole recording in a pretty good quality.

Автоматические Удовлетворители - "Тел. 1979-1994. Претензии Не Принимаются" [1995]

Artist: Автоматические Удовлетворители

Title: Тел. 1979-1994. Претензии Не Принимаются (pt.1)

Genre: Old School Punk

Country: Russia

Release date: 1995

Track List:

1. Ерунда
2. 8х2
3. Смех
4. Весна
5. Ночная Игра
6. Пакость
7. Ярко-Бледно-Розовый
8. Утренничек
9. Стерва
10. Прогресс
11. Огуречный Лосьон
12. Удовольствие

It might be a difficult question to answer who was the first metal band in the USSR, but there's little debate on who started the first Soviet punk band (if only we exclude the Baltic scene, which always was very different from the rest of Soviet rock scene). During the summer of 1979, Andrey "Svin" Panov, son of a relatively well-known ballet dancer Valery Panov and his first wife Liya, found out about Sex Pistols and decided to start a band which would sound like them. He was born in a rather well-known and affluent family, and received a good education, but it didn't stop him from choosing Sid Vicious as his role model. The name of his band, typically shortened to "Automatic Satisfiers", was thought to be a play on "Sex Pistols", but I personally think it probably was a homage to The Vibrators. The first public appearance of the band took place on 23 March 1980 in a small cafe in Leningrad.

AU never were a particularly popular band, and they remained in a deep underground until 1987. They also never had a consistent line-up, being rather a project of Svin and a revolving door of collaborators, some of which (Viktor Tsoy, for example) later became very prominent rock musicians. Like in case with the better known Siberian punk scene (which started in late 1982 with Egor Letov's early project "Possev Verlag"), there's a debate on whether AU can be compared with the Western punk scene or not. Svin himself later denied being a punk, saying that he'd prefer calling himself a "modernist" instead. This, however, isn't surprising - it was said in an interview he gave in 1996, and his later works (from 1995 and to his death in 1998) doesn't sound like punk at all. (One more interesting fact: in the same interview he said that he preferred not to sing in English because he didn't like how it sounds, and asserted that Hungarian is the best language for all kinds of rock music, especially the heavier ones. I find it hard to disagree with that, haha).

This cassette is a compilation of AU's songs from 1979-1994, re-recorded in 1995. There's a second part of this compilation as well, but it isn't as good as this one (if the word "good" is even applicable to anything Svin & AU have produced). The last two songs are rather disco/new wave than punk, yet the lyrics are just as provocative as in the rest of the compilation. If you wonder how the songs from this compilation sounded back in the times when they were originally written: there's an archive page that hosts live recordings of AU that survived to our day, starting from their first concert in Moscow in 1981. I surely don't recommend these bootlegs to start from if you're about to hear Svin's music for the first time, though.

Despite his GG Allin-esque lifestyle and his "rivalry" with Egor Letov, Svin was undoubtely an interesting person. However, he couldn't manage to spark the interest to punk rock in the USSR back then in early 80s - it happened several years later when the classic British punk recordings became more accessible to an average listener (Svin himself probably received them in late 70s from his father in Israel, but most other Soviet rock fans could know about Sex Pistols only from the critical articles in the press).

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Облачный Край - "X-я самодеятельность" [1983]

Artist: Облачный Край

Title: X-я самодеятельность

Genre: Hard'n'Heavy, Folk Rock, Punk & a little bit of everything

Country: USSR

Release date: 1983

Track List:

1. Интро
2. Члены коллекции (Я меломан)
3. Заздравная
4. Русская народная
5. Любовь к жизни
6. Пни (Ода бюрократу)
7. Финал 

Облачный Край (Cloudy Land) were one of the first USSR bands to incorporate some elements of heavy metal into their music, and generally a very unorthodox band who were ahead of their time (they even played something resembling krautrock on their early albums, while this style was almost completely unknown in the USSR back then). Formed in 1978 in Arkhangelsk, initially as a garage rock band "Мертвые Уши" ("Dead Ears") by a group of teenagers, they were active at least until 2011, when their founding member Sergey Bogaev passed away. They also were one of the first USSR bands to destroy their instruments on live shows (if memory serves, their guitarist broke a cheap guitar while being on stage at some rock festival in 1986, causing a scandal).

The story of the band started circa 1976, when Sergey Bogaev (a schoolboy back then) found out about Deep Purple and Rainbow, and decided to become a hard rocker himself. In 1978, he and his teenage friends Nikolay & Igor Lyskovsky and Oleg Rautkin finally decided to start a band, but they didn't have any instruments back then, except one acoustic guitar. This, however, didn't stop them from using primitive homemade instruments, and the result turned out to be surprisingly listenable. They've recorded two albums during 1978-80, which were remastered and released on CD in 2009.

In early 1982, they got acquainted with the members of Aquarium, one of the leading USSR rock bands back then, who were really suprised at the quality of their music played with such primitive instruments and equipment. This gave them the motivation to turn the band into something more serious. They've recorded 3 albums under their new name during 1982, still with low quality of production and mostly satirical lyrics, but that surely was a major step forward in their carrer.

This album was recorded an year later, shortly before they relocated to Leningrad from Arkhangelsk. 32 years later, it got a quite positive review on metal-archives.com, although I'm not sure if it can be considered metal. It's rather a little bit of everything: Pink Floyd- and Deep Purple-inspired hard rock with a lot of keyboards, very "punkish" sarcastic-sounding vocals and lots of folk melodies. They never took themselves too seriously (which is clearly seen from their lyrics, which are mostly satirical), but nevertheless, this recording is quite enjoyable even in 2015.

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Happy New Year!

One more year has passed, and I still have no idea why I continue to waste my time on a blog that has nearly no readers. Anyway, a little practice in English won't hurt, and arguably the best way of doing it is writing about something you're genuinely interested in (music, in my case).

It isn't in my habit to post "best of the X year" album lists, so I'll just make a wish that the coming year will be better than the passing one for everyone who reads my blog - and for me, of course. The second half of 2015 was pretty bad for me, and while I don't have much hopes for 2016 either, the life still goes on. Right now I'm playing WoW (without much enthusiasm, though) and wait for the new year to come...

Легион - "Апокалипсис" [1986]

Artist: Легион

Title: Апокалипсис

Genre: Heavy Metal

Country: USSR

Release date: 1986

Track List:

1. Апокалипсис (instrumental)
2. Легион
3. Мир под cекретом
4. Мираж
5. Осень (Листопад)
6. Волшебник
7. Чемпион
8. S.O.S. 

Легион/Legion were one of the first Soviet metal bands, if not the very first. There's some confusion regarding the year when they were formed - 1979 or 1981, depending on source. The most reliable guess is that the band was around in some form since 1979, but the solid line-up was established in 1981, when Alexey Bulgakov joined them as a vocalist (his vocals were and still are the strongest side of Legion).

This demo tape, called "Apocalypse", came out in 1986 but, like in case with the year or formation, I don't know for sure when these songs were written and recorded. All these songs (except for the intro) were re-recorded in better quality for the "Best Of 1980-1987" compilation that came out in 1997, and according to its release notes, tracks #3, #4 and #6 are from 1980. Well, if they were playing anything like this in 1980-1981, then they definitely were the first band in the USSR whose music was unquestionably metal. Metal recordings made in USSR before 1985 were very scarce, and most of them sound more like mid-70's hard rock than their NWOBHM contemporaries. This demo, on the other hand, is 100% NWOBHM-style metal. Legion also are rumoured to have an earlier demo titled "Битва" (Fight), which was recorded either in 1981 or 1984, but it's nowhere to be found (Legion's official site is of no help too), so we can only wonder what it sounded like...

Legion's first live show took place in 1984 and resulted in a scandal - apparently because they were more heavier and had more provocative lyrics than other Soviet rock bands of that time (but pretty average by NWOBHM standards). The band is still very active today, but they're too stereotypically "old school metal" for my taste. This recording, however, deserves attention due to its historical importance, and even its poor quality of production helped to preserve the spirit of that time (if you want these songs recorded in better quality, search for the 1997 compilation I mentioned above). Like many 70's and early 80's Soviet rock tapes, it was released without a cover, but you can have a band photo instead:

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Фронт - "Металлизация XXV" [2012]

Artist: Фронт

Title: Металлизация XXV

Genre: Industrial Thrash Metal

Country: Russia

Release date: 2012

Track List:

1. Мы победим!
2. Железный кулак
3. Готовность №1
4. Мрачные стены
5. Колыбельная
6. Ультиматум
7. Решётка
8. Металлизация

Фронт/Front were one of the first thrash metal bands in the USSR, and almost certainly the first to record a full-length thrash metal album there ("Металлизация '1987"). This is a re-recorded version of that historical album, released 25 years after. You may notice that, while still being thrash metal in its core, this album sounds quite "Rammstein-esque". That's because the band became seriously influenced by then-nascent Neue Deutsche Haerte movement during the mid-90s (probably one of the first to do that in Russia as well, in addition to being the pioneers of USSR thrash metal). The original 1987 version of the album can be found here.

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НХЛ - "Антрэпология" [1999]

Artist: НХЛ

Title: Антрэпология

Genre: Aggro-Industrial

Country: Russia

Release date: 1999

Track List:

1. Континенты
2. Идентификация
3. Изнеможение
4. Иммунитет
5. Атрибуты
6. Боже Царя...
7. Ночь
8. Человечество

НХЛ/NHL were formed in my city by Andrey Bugrov (songwriting, vocals, guitar, keyboards, drum programming) and Sergey Katorgin (solo guitar) in late 1994. Initially they played noisy post-punk which was common in Russian underground scene back then, but by late 1990s their sound gradually became more heavier. Unless I'm not aware of something, they were the first aggro-industrial band from my home region (it isn't like there are many of them anyway...) The band themselves described their style as "pseudo-social post-industrial sympho-punk" (whatever it means), and mentioned Ministry, NIN, Rammstein and Lacrimosa among the bands that have inspired them.

NHL split up circa 2002, but Andrey Bugrov released a couple more albums under this name during 2003-2005 (which are nowhere near as good the ones from 1990s, though). This cassette is probably the best release in their discography, although the previous one ("Флаг на щеке" '98) was pretty good too. It was recorded during the time when the members of NHL were getting into rapcore, so the hip-hop influence on the vocal work is quite prominent (hence the name of the release, "AnthRAPology"). It's also said to feature female vocals by Olga Shestaeva, but honestly I can't heard any. The quality of sound on the master tape was quite good, but this only rip I could find on the net is of rather poor quality (but still listenable). My personal favourite is the track #5 ("Attributes"). For those who's interested, the rest of their discography can be found here.

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Рок-Синдром - s/t EP [1987]

Artist: Рок-Синдром

Title: Рок-Синдром '87

Genre: Heavy Metal

Country: USSR

Release date: 1987

Track List:

1. Рок-синдром
2. Чёрная мгла
3. Война

Now here's probably the first metal band from my city. Рок-Синдром / Rock Syndrome were formed in 1986 (the same year I was born) as a 5-pice band, and on 30th October the same year they took part in the 1st official rock festival in the city (where they were the heaviest band). During 1987 they undergone several lineup changes before finally splitting up. Here's a photo of the original 5 members:

In 1998, Sergey Gorbunov (the original vocalist and guitarist) decided to reform the band. Nowadays they reside in Moscow and consist mainly of Sergey Gorbunov (vocals, guitars) and Alena Poltavskaya (fretless bass guitar), as well as some additional live members:

As for this demo EP, I must admit it's only of historical interest nowadays, although the quality of recording isn't that horrible (yet it's still bad, especially when it comes to vocals, but it's understandable given the circumstances). Collectors of rare Motorhead-like metal from the 1980s should pay attention.

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