Translated material
Solo "salt"
“Aquarium is a winged shining beast that brings you a medicine,” Boris Grebenshchikov once determined the essence of the group. And you can’t argue with this: for more than forty years, the Aquarium has not recorded a single whole minor album. Yes, there were enough gloomy songs, but on the way back to Arkhangelsk there was always a place for marching cows , vodka with a nail interfered with a girl with an oars , and the last turn led to the entrance to the subway, where it was customary to go down with a crossbow and a samurai sword between the teeth. Such a specific humor was invariably an important part of the group mythology-many could not stand the “aquarium” just because of the people who came from the juniper, and the immortal sister of Ho, who tickles the antelope of heaven.
That's just in the new album “Salt” BG refused both humor and familiar fairy -tale heroes, because now the time is not funny and not fabulous. Now is the time when most Sorokinsky nightmares have come true and darkness has thickened not only under the dome, but also under the feet, as well as in the heads and hearts. In the songs of the BG, only you and I, we and God, and on the other side - are sinister, taking the form of either the ministers of love with a hammer and nails, then the governor with a gun in the basement of a burning house. And the only "aquarium" characters on the record, Rosa Lespromkhoz and Maria is a wedding bird, rush to the holiday of the crop in the Labor Palace; The celebration is not even stagnation - degradation. It seems that the rowers have never been so angry, concrete and gloomy - here the track with the promising name “selfie” turns into a bitter self -portrait written in coal, with a foreboding of death: “This flight is coming to an end.” The guitar licks, like a faulty turbine turbine, a solo, put backwards backwards, and it seems as if it slowly drags it into this turbine.
It is not surprising that the “salt” is a solo album: the “aquarium” format is too light for such a purposeful movement in the dusk. This is confirmed by BG himself: “I wanted songs of funny, but I got completely different, but very compatible in tonality with the amazingly strange time in which we now live; With a time, when almost all of us for not quite understandable reasons have taken up arms against each other. ” And “Salt” is taken to explain our rickety reality in the same way as “Russian album” once made, another solo masterpiece of the BG, where a swallow with an ax in his paws jumped along the ruins of the country and found enemies everywhere.
Now the time is not funny and not fabulous.
“No matter how much we sang, it’s the same as silent” - with such words a new record starts, and this, perhaps, is the disappointment of Grebenshchikov in his flock. Songs can change the world - at the BG as the navigator of the Aquarium, a winged beast with a medicine behind the bosom, there is no doubt about the strength of music. BG-grater has a different opinion: in correspondence with Denis Boyarinov, he insisted that Russia would save, first of all, an improvement in the education system. Because without the foundation that gives a qualitative education, we are doomed to slide back and down the scale of history, repeating old mistakes. “Salt” captures this regression: BG takes out of the 80s archives an unknown song “If I leave”, and the composition from those times when the black government “Volga” was on duty outside the window of young Boris, it is again relevant. It is interesting that Alexander Vasiliev, on the album, “Flooding of Vision” (2012) of the SPLIN group predicted precisely the black “Volga” suicidal jump to the Caspian Sea - two years later it turned out that such things were not drowning on their own. They need a load that will pull to the bottom: a load of revolution or a load of time. BG is true to himself and even in a hoarse guitar counting prefers the second option: “The morning is still far; Nothing, we will wait. "
“Salt” was written in London, Los Angeles and St. Petersburg, and Mitchell Frum, an American producer-veteran, who once worked with McCartney, Los Lobos and Pearl Jam , helped to look for a “salty” sound to Grebenshchikov. On four tracks, the guitar and the drums of Paul and Jeremy Staisi from the surroundings of Noel Gallagher are heard (by the way, we will see the Staisi brothers with BG at the nearest concerts). At the same time, “salt” sounds without revelations, and even a pile of invited stars with its solo does not take the album outside the musical gravity of the Aquarium. The fighting flute of Ian Anderson is decorated with “love during the war” , the guitar of Richard Thompson infects the energy of the village council in the “governor”, and the bass-klaron Crimson bass -hacks take off. But he blows everyone to the side of the road when BG raises his head and growls: “There are no faces of those who are against; those who are with us. Do not dare to approach until you say who you are. ” So the lyrics subordinates the music, the contours of the songs are aggravated to match the text, and the rhythm becomes simple, chopped, almost marching - so as not to get confused underfoot.
The “salty” path passes along a well -known route - along the way to the temple. “I will wait for the freezer at night” - sounds in the first track of the album, and, having stooped in the winter snowdrifts and sticky dusk, BG goes to the final anthem “Stella Maris” , which is built on the foundation of the medieval choral that appeals to the sea of the sea (one of the names of the Mother of God). Alone, having got off the proven ship the Aquarium, gloomy and gloomy, rowers still remains an arrow of the compass, which indicates the side of the world. There is simply no other side for him.