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Молчат Дома - Этажи

You may be wondering, 'Is the band Молчат Дома, who created the album, Этажи, a foreign band?' and 'Are they going to be singing some non-english language, perhaps Russian?' The answer to both of these questions is yes. I can't remember how I found this album originally, but one day it came up in my YouTube recommended, I instantly recognized the cover, and decided to give it a listen. It was really good. It reminded of me listening to Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures for the first time. Note: In this review, I italicize Russian words written in the Roman alphabet, put "quotation marks" around English translations, and do nothing to Russian words written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Молчат Дома or Molchat Doma (roughly translates to "The Houses are Silent") is a 'cold wave' band. This is a genre of music that I don't know too much about, but from what I understand the genre is close to goth, except more detached and minimalistic. Si...

Путь - Песни Смерти

Who knew that accordion would be so good in black metal? Путь, translated to Path or Pathway in English, is a Russian black metal band. Earlier, I reviewed another Russian band called Молчат Дома ( check out my review of Молчат Дома - Этажи here ) and, I'm not sure if it's a quality of all Russian music or just these two bands but, they both have this distant, detached feeling in their music that can only be described as "cold". This "coldness" can be easily felt on the album's first track "Эпитафия" or "Epitaph". The song starts with a slow plucked guitar melody, reminiscent of Молчат Дома. It slowly builds up till it suddenly stops and an overwhelming wall of guitars and drums sweeps in. The blast-beat is somewhat faded into the background, to give the song a smoother, more sullen sound, and cascades of toms are played in the foreground, resulting in this exciting, and almost mystical sound. In the last 20 seconds, the song brea...

My Bloody Valentine - Loveless

Have you ever listened to psychedelic rock an thought "man, this isn't trippy enough, I wish there was some kind of super psychedelic genre"? Well now you have it with the shoegaze album Loveless by My Bloody Valentine! Shoegaze (also called shoegazing) sounds like psychedelic, stoned and on acid. The genre features loud distorted guitars with a blurry dreamlike sound and softer, muffled vocals in the background. The hazy wall of sound created by shoegaze is purposely there to try to overwhelm the listener. Whenever I listen to shoegaze I feel like I am floating through space in a dream, which is a result of the calming effects of the music. Shoegaze is called as such because of British newspapers who criticized the new genre by saying all the musicians did was gaze at their shoes during live performances. These same newspapers also coined the term "shoegazing," which eventually stuck. The reason why they always looked at their feet, is shoegaze bands heavily u...

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