Make us beautiful: Lumen are looking for love, Draconian are exploring ruins

The last month of spring turned out to be moody and threw us into heat and cold — in the most literal meteorological sense of the word. As always, music helped to keep warm/ cool (according to the weather) — fortunately, there were plenty of interesting novelties in May. The most interesting music albums in May that you might have accidentally missed are in the Izvestia review.

Lumen

"Love and Beauty"

Ufa band Lumen is one of the few in Russian rock that has learned to exist outside of its usual trajectory. While their peers have either turned into a museum of their own hits, or exploit the nostalgia of older fans, Lumen continues to be filled with the original rock and roll storm-und-drang, and quite convincingly. For more than 20 years of their existence, it's as if they really haven't aged for a moment — no posture, everything is "like garlic". From the early strain of "No preservatives" to the cold and almost industrial "Dissonance", the band gradually got rid of teenage straightforwardness, without turning into a boring group "for parents" — although it is possible that grandparents are already on the way among the fans.

In "Love and Beauty" there is less frontal punk pressure and more air: guitars do not cut space, but smolder inside it, like old amplifiers left on all night. Lumen suddenly rely not on anger, but on vulnerability — and that's why the record turns out to be one of the heaviest in their discography. At its best, the album resembles the late Deftones, reassembled through the prism of Central Russian melancholy and post-Soviet gloom. Even when the lyrics slip into declarativeness, the music keeps them from banality — which is, let's say, not a frequent phenomenon for Russian rock.

Draconian

In Somnolent Ruin

The Swedish masters of Gothic Duma have never aspired to excessive "heaviness": instead of aggression, weight and temperature always worked here — as if every song was recorded inside a frozen cathedral, where the echo is more important than the riff. On the eighth full-length album, which took six long years to complete, Anders Jacobsson's growling sounds, perhaps, not threatening, but like the final roar of a hunted animal. Lisa Johansson's female vocals, which have returned to the band, once again effectively dissonate with the blast beats and guitar haze of Draconian, as if they had returned to the days of their classic works Arcane Rain Fell and Turning Season Within.

The name alboma ("In sleepy destruction") does not deceive: nine tracks slowly settle inside the listener like ashes after a long-ended fire. The sound has become noticeably heavier and drier than in the previous album (Under a Godless Veil), expressive pauses only complement the feeling of absolute emptiness. The best moments — The Monochrome Blade, Misanthrope River and the final Lethe — work as protracted bouts of emotional claustrophobia. In this total sterility, Draconians find a strange beauty—not romantic, but almost geological.

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Genesis Owusu

Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge

An Australian of Ghanaian descent, Genesis Owusu, occupies a special place in the modern hip-hop scene. His albums are conceptual worlds where postpunk collides with neo-soul, hip—hop collides with art-funk, and political rage exists alongside almost theatrical eccentricity. After the breakthrough of Smiling With No Teeth and the nervous, claustrophobic Struggler, it became clear that Genesis was not interested in genre eclecticism in itself, but in a sense of cultural overheating, in which any identity begins to melt under the pressure of media, algorithms and collective anxiety.

At Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge, Owusu transforms the news feed into a nervous collage of synth-punk, ragged funk and industrial hip-hop. The main achievement of the record is its physical sense of anxiety: the production seems to be constantly overloaded, the vocals break off between a sermon and a nervous tic, and the rhythms work like an alarm in an empty shopping mall. Sometimes the album lacks discipline — the second half deliberately exhausts the listener with repetitions and emotional overload, but it is this redundancy that makes it convincing.

The Narrator

Phosphor

German metalcore band The Narrator has a strange fate: they appeared at a time when the genre had already managed to turn into its own shadow — sleek, algorithmically verified and safe. But instead of breaking the structure, the band chose to integrate deeper into it. The Narrator took their second album seriously, like a maturity test, and the end result sounds like it was put together by engineers obsessed with technological purity.

Phosphorus "shines" like the chemical element of the same name: it is cold, dim and, perhaps, unsafe. The record moves with almost industrial precision — breakdowns occur exactly at the second when the brain starts waiting for them, melodic choruses gently blur aggression, and Fabian Jochum's vocals balance between hysterical growl and sterile melancholy. The best moments of the album are those where the band allows themselves to become a little less "correct". Dissection suddenly falls into an almost deathcore heaviness, as if The Narrator forgets for a minute about the need to be accessible. Two Lives provides a rare respite, in which one feels not sober calculation, but real human fatigue.

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Orchestra and vocal group "Disco" by Igor Petrenko

"Disco"

The album, released in 1978 and re-released digitally as Melody, has a very indirect relationship to disco, despite its name. Rather, it is an attempt (and quite successful) to "reassemble" glossy European easy listening in the spirit of James Last, Caravelli or Paul Mauriat in a Soviet way — with the careful discipline of large orchestras, jazz training and careful flirtation with dance music.

Velvet strings, "soaring" brass instruments and a moderately danceable rhythm befitting equally a socialist rural club and a bourgeois high society salon. Actually, this is about how they imagined the luxurious life of the decaying West behind the iron curtain — on a grand scale, but within the bounds of decency. "Bridges of Leningrad" and "Very Well" sparkle with almost cinematic optimism, while covers and instrumental numbers balance between funk, lounge and pop theatricality. It is especially surprising how lively and fresh the arrangements sound — after all, in Soviet times, musicians knew their business on "yat".