Grazhdanskaya Oborona-Optimizm LP (1985)

This was the first LP I posted when I started this blog (as Peachy Carnahan says in The Man Who Would be King, "Three summers. And a thousand years ago."). GrOb is a band I could spend a long time perorating about: why their music is so idiosyncratically brilliant; why they embody the 1980s as a cultural moment; why they made so much sense as a form of protest at a time when pop-music-as-protest had pretty much run its race in Europe & the States; and so on and so on....
....but as y'all know, that sort of pseudo-intellectual garble-gook is a waste of time. This is a brilliant album by a band that's still not very well known outside their motherland, despite Kevin DeBroux's heroic attempts to draw attention to them, including a feature in Vice Magazine. They should be as much a household name in the Anglophone punk world as venerated hardcore heroes like Bastard, Anti-Cimex, or Negazione.

They never will be a household name outside the Slavic-speaking/Cyrillic-reading world, though, by my guess. Why? It has nothing to do with language barriers, per se. Rather, it's because GrOb made fundamentally tender, vulnerable music with humor and dry wit and a sense of subtlety that's lost on people who just wanna be beaten over the head over and over and over when they listen to music. Which is basically everybody, from your average Katy Perry fan to kids drinking themselves stupid to Whitehouse: at the end of the day, what's the fucking difference between the two? One is offensively obvious and the other is obviously offensive, that's all.

GrOb is a rare band that resonates outside its language-group and, despite Igor Letov's turn to Great Russian chauvinism in the Yeltsin years, they remain an inspiration to dissidents and marginals everywhere. Like Ray Davies said long ago, "there's weirdos everywhere."

Listen to this piece of brilliance HERE! If anyone knows of recent re-issues of the GrOb LPs, please get in touch-I would happily buy and promote said reissues if they exist.*

Same goes for the Yanka Dyagileva LP, Aquarium, et. al. This stuff needs the sort of loving repressing already visited on nullnodes like the Exploited!

*Edit, 2.4.14: Re-up'd the file, this version should work!*

*Edit, 9.05.14: Re-up'd the file again, THIS should work.*

Grazhdanskaya Oborona-Everything is going according to plan LP (1988)

If you don't know who Grazhdanskaya Oborona is by now, you haven't been paying attention.

My favorite GrOb album is probably 1985's Optimizm, but this one has one of Egor Letov's best compositions, "Everything is going according to plan," the album's eponymous track, while Egor really croons it outta the park on track six.

The album downloads with Cyrillic songtitles, but a friend was kind enough to translate 'em for me-if some of the song titles sound strange, don't be suprised, I think they're colloquial Russian.
Big ups to Vaslav the Red for translating!

According to plan//Download!
Latinized/translated song titles:
1. Prologue
2. Which sky?
3. System (as in, "fuck the system!")
4. Judas will be in Heaven
5. Your own shit doesn's stink
6. Keep on keepin' on
7. Someone got lucky
8. Society Memory (Vaslav says this was the name of an Russian ultra-nationalist group formed during the USSR's dissolution)
9. Noodle
10. Second Echelon
11. A person is a wolf to other people
12. Forest
13. Suicide
14. The state
15. One time
16. Everything is going according to plan
17. Final
18. That's what kind of sky!

Grazhdanskaya Oborona-Poganaya Molodej LP (1985)

Only Soviet-era Siberia, home of the gulag, could have produced a sound this odd and eccentrically endearing. This isn't uniformly glum (musically, dunno about lyrically), but while NATO-zone bands were aping Black Flag in comparative comfort, GrOb were on the run from the KGB and recording into 4-tracks around Novosibirsk. I love American hardcore, but much of it rings false compared to GrOb-there's a warmth and humanity here that's very rare in punk.

 GrOb made massive strides compositionally between Poganaya Molodej and Optimizm. The stand out tracks are "zoopark" and "mama mama..." For want of a better lazy phrase, this is gulag dub: a lilting beat, contrapuntal guitar notes, and Igor intoning somewhere behind the amp, no doubt more interested in swigging from that brown bag at his hip. Oh, and the last track is one of the GrOb folks going to the bathroom. F'real. 

Oh God save history.  [//DOWNLOAD]
I'm sure Vladimir Putin would be happy to sell you a copy of this for twenty bajillion rubles on EBay. Instead, you should buy Shit in the Garden, Pink Reason's recent, and hrow some money Kevin Failure's way.  (Or paypal email at pinkreason@gmail.com). 
He's on tour now and doing research for a book on Siberian punk. People like Yanka Dyagileva and Igor Letov, and the Soviet punk scene generally, deserve a book  far more than most of their peers in the British and American scenes (Henry Rollins, Uk '82, fuck you!), so SUPPORT DUDE!

Grazhdanskaya Oborona-Optimizm (1985)

Weird, amazing, lofi punk from the Gorby-era USSR. These guys spent years on the run from the KGB for playing punk-how many of us are that committed, eh?
The standout track for me is "Na nasyh glazah"-it sounds like a Lee Scratch Perry tune that morphed into a feedback-tinged Russian ballad about...I dunno what. Shit roolz.
Oh, and Vice Magazine apparently approves of 'em. Don't be deterred.

Read about 'em

Listen