Отстой- Сахара EP (2014)

So what if this thing came out back in April, Petrograd's Otstoy is a great summer soundtrack. Snide, off-the-cuff-'cause-who's-really-listening vocals, all the tone the Russian steppes can offer, and a drumbeat so basic it might just be someone tapping their foot against a tin can. That's it.

And man, is the one (ok, maybe 2) note guitar solo on the first song majestic! Majestic in the way you'd expect from a band that probably consists of one dude chainsmoking and sippin' on potato-mash vodka in the studio and bangin' out whatever comes to mind. The second song's even better. By song three you've probably moved onto your 5th beer of the night, so you won't remember it, but it's good too.

Go swimming, go drinking, go listen to Otstoy!

Отстой-Тупым EP (2014)

Everyone's shitting their pants right now about the Sochi Olympics and Putin's terminal cretinism. Really, though, y'all should really be shitting yr pants to this delightful bit of jerky, psyched-out garage from St. Petersburg.* A one-man act from the city that gave us the October Revolution, Отстой is crude and bratty. Yet beneath the brazen fuzztone fuckery lurks songs that are, uh, real songs: vocal phrasing that changes with the verses and choruses, squalling peaks and valleys, etc tc.

The first song wallows in dissonant tone waves before it jerks into what BrianJonestownMassacre mighta sounded like if they were a punk band recording on 4-track instead of a bunch of LA hipsters doing mountains of coke. It's got the same arrogant nonchalance and this guy manages to pull off some stellar guitar licks with too-cool-for-school wasteoid vocal stylin'. The next two songs are more of the same: crude, not stupid, garage rock filtered through a "whogivesafuck let's drop acid and record" sensibility. I have no idea if this guy is in fact an acid fan but this EP gives me the image of a bunch of people hangin' round on a cold winter's night guzzling vodka and getting fried on acid, babbling about how they should start a loud garageband pisstake on BJM. This is the result.

GET INTO IT, HERE!

*Otstoy is just one of several hot bands coming out of St. Petersburg. Interested readers should check out this article on the Far From Moscow site for more information.

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.*

Sonic Death-Uncomplete Session LP (2012)

St. Petersburg's Sonic Death is one of my favorite new bands, so I resume frequent blogging with a writeup of their recent B-sides, live tracks, and rarities LP.

I'm surprised that they already have enough material for a collection like this, but I'm not complaining: in addition to the rambamthankyamam garage stomp you know and love from their Gothic Sessions EP, there's hidden gems like "untitled" and the pounding slow burn of the live track "Temnota."

The LP confirms the impression I got from the "Gothic Sessions" EP: Sonic Death pretty much has the market cornered on tight garage with a heart of gold. There's a tenderness in the singer's voice that's rare in this genre, and Sonic Death's subdued, brooding interludes ("Son", "Boyfriend") are just as enjoyable as their more straightforwardly garagepunk numbers. Hell, I didn't even cringe at the guitar-'n'-banjo tune "Boyfriend," and I hate banjos! "Zmeya" is the best track here, though: a propulsive, atmospheric drumbeat digs out a rhythmic trench that blurs together guitar and drums.

Anyways, Sonic Death does it again on this LP. The only vice, implicit in the nature of the album, is its uneveness: there's no flow to the songs, but whatever. Look for more madness from these demented fellas soon.

Listen to "Uncomplete Sessions," then BUY IT, HERE.

Petition against imprisonment of Pussy Riot collective

Usually I try to leave politics out of Drug Punk, but this one is unavoidable-as The Clash sang in 1977, "you have to deal with it/it is the currency."

Three members of the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot are facing three years in prison for performing a song in the cathedral of Kazan. Basic human rights issues aside, this is pretty important in terms of identity/protest politics in Russia-as I understand it, Pussy Riot's one of the first riot grrl-style groups over there.

Given how indebted this blog, in spirit and style, is to Soviet dissidents like Yanka and Igor Letov, it would be criminal for me not to demand that you sign this petition immediately:

AMNESTY FOR PUSSY RIOT!

Please also attend any benefit/solidarity shows in your area.

Modern Howl-Jasco C.W. EP (2012)

Kaliningrad's Modern Howl, composed of Mssrs. Paul Von Aphid and Speed Wulf, are decidely not yr average Drug Punk group. In place of buzzsaw howl or gurgling bloody messes, they present us with a few tracks of heavily processed electro-synth.

I'm having trouble classifying this, which is probably a good thing. What I hear are sonic collages borrowing from several genres. This is dance music for drugged out losers like myself who wouldn't be caught dead in a nightclub (like Mssr. Byrne said, 'this ain't no party, this ain't no disco!') and would rather nod out on Percosets to a beat that's only marginally funky than shake ya ass to whatever the kids party to these days.

 In all probability that's not the case, and I'm guessing people do indeed dance to this stuff at nightclubs. I just dunno nuthin' 'bout 'em. The tracks feature heavy sampling cut up and scissored together in a confusing way approximating aural assault.

The only ambiance I can conjure up for this EP is as follows: nighttime in a major city (say, Chicago). It's five a.m., you've been out all night raging it, and the sun is almost starting to peek over the horizon hinting at another broken day spent convalescing from your own self-induced abuse. Yr walkin' down a dark alley contemplating where the next beer or sleeping pill is whatever and suddenly a fucking goblin jumps out from behind that dumpster, sticks a scimitar in ya, and vanishes. Ya dunno what to do! Take that! Haha!

Download "Jasco C.W." here. Mssrs. Aphid and Wulf's label has a sick amount of stuff up, check out the other releases if ya dig this.

Solar Snake-s/t EP (2012)

 * Bands/musicians: if I take a long time to respond to you or post yr stuff, it's not indifference but the fact that I have to act like an adult in between bouts of imitating Lester Bangs.*

Solar Snake is from Murmansk, Russia, a lovely port fronting on the White Sea. This drug punk in chief ain't no dummy, and knows where Murmansk is! It was a major shipment point for military hardware goin' to Crazy Uncle Joe during The Big One (World War II), and was also where Elizabeth I of England's emissaries landed when initiating diplomatic contacts with Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.

Historical geography lessons aside, Solar Snake gushes through some sloppy, noisy, distortion-overloaded blues-meets-shitgaze on what I assume is their debut EP. This falls somewhere between the tuneful end of drone and the harsh, anti-social end of lofi indie: there's a thick, muddy layer of guitar fuzz slathered over everything like peanut butter covering mouldy bread. Deep beneath the guitar squall, the singer intones in what could be Russian or English (honestly the vocals are mixed too low for me to tell) while the rhythm sections plods through their sections. "Rumble" brilliantly plagiarizes the riff of "Yr Gonna Miss Me" by 13th Floor Elevators, but slows it down and strips it to a savage, naked howl. Definitely the best track here. Instead of shredding, like the Roky original, it slithers along, draggin' you in its oil-slicked wake. Nod out to this after guzzling a bottle of robitussin and downing some acid.

I just got home, wasted and alone, and Solar Snake is shaping up to be a good accompaniment to a July evening where the sun doesn't go down til 9 pm: the noisy guitar licks are my companion in isolation, and there's a chilly, frigid feel to the whole thing that has something to do either with the guitar-domination nature of the recording, or the fact that this band is recording in the most populated city north of the Arctic Circle. Either way, keep on keepin' on, Solar Snakes!

Listen to the Snakes here. ROCK ON, RUSSIA!

Sonic Death-Gothic Sessions EP (2012)

...Or, the Sonics are back from the dead, and have taken up residency in St. Petersburg. Where they are suffering from the blues.

I'm a little behind on this one, but it blew me away when I played it yesterday with bong smoke billowing out my bedroom window. St. Petersburg's Sonic Death meld garage riffing and psychedelic melancholy to create an EP that's at the top of my list for 2012.

The opener, "Наслаждение," is a mellow, mid-tempo misery stomp, setting the scene nicely for what comes next. "Сейчас (Сукин Сын)" is more concrete, with a snare drum echoing off the basic guitar chords and the singer talk-singing over the hum. "Ко Мне" features a sick guitar riff no doubt stolen from a Thirteenth-Floor Elevators tune with a freaked out, warbling bridge I can't get outta my head. The last track, "Пол," sounds like Yanka Dyagileva on a good day, with a backing band: tambourines, gently strummed acoustic guitar, and mumble-mouthed vocal phrasing.

      What appeals to me the most about Sonic Death is the depth of these songs: the form is garage, but the ambiance completely lacks the cocky, swaggering feel of most American garage. In its place is a bitter(sweet), knowing weariness that most American bands can't muster. I don't know Russian but the music and words connect on a visceral level. As it happens, Dead Moon's "In the Graveyard" follows this EP when I play it on Itunes, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and compare the singer's voice to Fred Cole's: they don't sound alike, but like Fred Cole, this dude knows how you feel and would probably be happy to share some whiskey with you.

Get weird here.