Girlish Commotion: Pulp demands more, Shilkloper catches whales

In the first month of summer, the seemingly forever departed heroes of britpop returned to us, the young lions (or rather, lionesses) of Ural rock released their first full-fledged album, and the great Alexander Kneifel finally received a musical offering worthy of his scale. But first things first: Izvestia is about the most important releases in June that you might have forgotten to listen to for some reason.

Pulp

More

The melancholic Brits, led by the bespectacled neurotic Jarvis Cocker, never fit into the category — they may have been classified as "britpop", but let's face it, neither in age, nor in sound, nor in the general mood of their songs Pulp did not really match Oasis or Blur. Nevertheless, their hymns to alienation and the fear of old age found a grateful listener. At the beginning of the noughties, the band stopped working — and now, after 24 years of silence, they returned with the album More. Those who were afraid of dull nostalgia, we hasten to reassure.: This is a serious, lively continuation of the story that began more than 30 years ago.

Producer James Ford carefully updates the sound, and Cocker is once again teetering on the edge of an intimate farce, playing with rhymes, referring either to Bergman or The Smiths. The lyrics again have existential and almost youthful eroticism, but also (quite understandable, given the age of the author) gray-haired observations like "life is too short to drink bad wine." It's hard not to agree — we're waiting for new revelations, as Coker has already told reporters that More is "not the end, but a comma" in the Pulp story.

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"The maiden"

"My heart"

The band "Devitsa" (emphasis on the first syllable), perhaps the most interesting representatives of the "dark Ural wave", are returning with the longest release in their discography — the album "My Heart". This is a carefully constructed emotional narrative in which genre boundaries are erased, giving way to subtle musical alchemy.

The beginning is set by the neofolk "Skyward" — airy, morning, with an ambient mood, smoothly picking up the pace. But already in the second track, completely unexpected dances begin, almost of an African nature. Devitsa is not afraid to mix styles, from dream pop to synthpop and from shoegaze to neo-folk. The texts are dominated by an inescapable Russian womanly longing, however, skipped through the prism of the vision of a modern young lady living on the edge between reality and the Internet. The final "Wedding" may well be considered a masterpiece of Russian Gothic — not in the sense that fans of Scandinavian pop-metallers put into the term, but in the original literary sense.

Death In Vegas

Death Mask

Death in Vegas' seventh studio album, which fans had to wait seven years for, once again takes them into the depths of dark techno and industrial sound. Richard Firles finally abandoned any flirtation with the masses (which earned him a certain popularity and even a place in the charts in the late 1990s): now there are only monotonous drones, disturbing noise and an obsessive paranoid rhythm.

The minimalist sound and categorical rejection of the traditional song structure of Death Mask may well disappoint old fans who were expecting the return of collaboration with star vocalists (remember, Iggy Pop, Bobby Gillespie and Liam Gallagher once sang on Death in Vegas hits) and some melodiousness. However, the same circumstances can also lead to a Firless project for new young listeners who are still looking for more than just the "beautiful" or utilitarian in music, such as fitness for the dance floor.

Arkady Shilkloper, BGF Big Band

Whale Songs

The French horn, as you know, is not the most jazzy instrument, but Arkady Fimovich Shilkloper has been successfully refuting this postulate for decades. And it's probably not just about the musician's personal talent (however, "talent" is a fundamentally wrong word; the entire jazz audience has long agreed that Schilkloper is a genius), but also about the limited capabilities of his instrument itself, this mutated post horn. Schilkloper not only makes full use of these "straitened circumstances", extracting the most amazing sounds not only from the French horn, but also from related and very exotic instruments like the Alpine horn, but demonstrates that nothing is impossible for a real musician — he wants to, and he will play on a comb.

Arkady Fimovich's new album was recorded — and again in the most unexpected way — with a traditional big band, the Bashkir State Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Oleg Kasimov. Against the background of a swinging orchestra, Schilkloper, with his strict, concise instrument, acts as a real frontman, complementing the band, but not disappearing into its sound. This is how great pop singers like Sinatra, Bennett or Martin once interacted with the big band. An extraordinarily elegant, fresh and timely record, clearly showing that jazz has not turned into a boring "academic" genre. And what's with the whales, whose songs are promised in the title, figure it out for yourself.

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Alexander Kneifel

"Three degrees of freedom. Music > Cinema > USSR. Alexander Kneifel"

Oleg Nesterov, the head of the Snegiri label and the permanent leader of the Moscow Megapolis group, continues his Don quixotic ballet Three Degrees of Freedom, dedicated to the work of Soviet avant-garde composers in cinema. The first heroes were Alfred Schnittke and Oleg Karavaichuk, and the next (hopefully not the final chord) was a magnificent selection of compositions by Alexander Kneifel.

"What is important is that this time I managed to interact with my hero during his lifetime, in his final year, to talk a lot, to travel through his personal archives. He put together the music himself for both the record and the digital release. Even the restoration and remastering — everything was under his watchful control," Nesterov stressed. The original recordings performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra were made for such films as "Rafferty", "Trail of the Wolverine", "I am an actress", "Torpedo Bombers", "Confrontation", "Criminal Talent", "Emergency of regional scale", "It was by the sea", "The Defector". His music was performed by Mstislav Rostropovich, and admired by David Byrne, who tried to publish it at his company back in Soviet times. These 33 tracks perhaps provide an adequate understanding of why such different people worshiped and continue to worship Alexander Aronovich's gift.