Played on their field

Medusa visited Brainstorm, the most cosmopolitan and popular group of the Baltic states

On August 29, the Latvian group of Brainstorm performed in Riga, or, as they call themselves in Latvia, prāta vētra. Brainstorm is an amazing team that destroys the stereotypes about any oppression of the Russian language in Latvia, and a kind of friendship ambassador between peoples. Tens of thousands of people came to see the Brainstorm large -scale concert in Riga, including the Jellyfish journalist Pavel Borisov.

Brainstorm in the beginning of the two thousandth became a rare example of a group, the career of which was launched by Eurovision . Most of the participants in the song contest dissolve without a trace even after victories, and Renars Cauers and the company on the “Eurovision” allowed to prove themselves as a strong pop-rock team with a greater future that in his native Latvia, in Europe and Russia. A few years later, concerts in Moscow Luzhniki, large-scale tours in Europe and performances with the legendary American indie group REM became the norm for the Brainstorm. Kaupers even took for the Russian version of the NME magazine an interview from the leader of REM Michael Staype and either jokingly or was seriously interested in him what to be a rock band from Greece (in fact, REM from the city of Atens in the state of Georgia).

Since the late 1990s, Brainstorm recorded the same songs in several versions-in Latvian, Russian or English. So it also happened with the last album of the group “7 Steps of Fresh Air”. The disk was released in May 2015 in two versions - one completely in Latvian, the other, especially for the Russian market, consists of the same songs in Russian and English. The texts, of course, are changing. For example, in one of the compositions from the Latvian version, there is nothing like that in the English -speaking version about a walk in Kronvalda in Riga. The general meaning of the songs remains unchanged - love, romance, bright melancholy. The multi -language approach allows Brainstorm to play three full -fledged programs depending on the country, and it cannot be said that in Russian the same songs sound worse than in Latvian or English.

In one of the compositions from the new album, Kaupers sings that the sun does not shine, as in 2010, although you can’t say it in music. Brainstorm now is a pop rock, made just according to the canons of five years ago, without special experiments and waste from the genre, although not so long ago the group began to flirt with hip-hop .

In Latvia, Brainstorm has the status of national heroes: everyone knows their songs, and tens of thousands of people gather for concerts. For four Latvian performances in support of “7 Steps of Fresh Air” Brainstorm listened to more than 100 thousand people (almost half of them came to the Riga concert) - and this despite the fact that, according to official figures, a little less than two million people live. The concert in Riga was completed by a tour of Latvia and was completely special in both the organization and the show. For the performance of the group, they prepared a field near the city center, equipped according to the canons of a good European festival: it was upset by numerous tents with food and drinks and other festival attributes.

The Rigaians began to pull themselves on the field long before the concert. As a result, almost 50 thousand people came. So many people in Riga are not going to any such event. When it got dark, the concert could be mistaken for some British Reding, which for the sake of several dozen groups, only two times more people come.

The concert was opened by the Latvian group of Carnival Youuth, who played the experimental indie-rock in moderation-pleasant, but nothing special (except that the children of Renars Kaupers play there). Ten minutes before Brainstorm on giant screens, the countdown began, closer to the beginning of the set every second was met with screams and applause.

The first chords of the title composition with “7 Steps of Fresh Air” sounded simultaneously with the fireworks above the stage. The audience sang all the songs by heart, even completely new, and a feeling of unity was hung over the field - probably, the concerts of U2 in the native Ireland for them look like that. Almost all the songs of Brainstorm sang in Latvian, in his native language Kauers talked with the public, only occasionally moving into Russian and English. In the set list there was a place for several English-speaking and Russian-speaking songs, for example, a free cover for the song “On the dawn” of the Alliance group (it was sung by the Mad Dog Grandge group) and the obligatory “foreign cars”, written together with Bi-2. The whole crowd sang both songs with the same enthusiasm as the hits in Latvian, not making differences between languages ​​in the city, where many families speak Russian.

With the U2 Riga concert, Brainstorm unites not only the “home factor”, but also the incredible level of the show itself. The perfectly rebuilt sound allowed to hear every note and every word of Caupers, and the scene itself was decorated in the form of several huge video screens, on which the musicians and the faces of people in the crowd and the video, the main character of which became the ghost marching to the music, similar to a bug from the Marvel comics.

After a series of Latvian concerts, Brainstorm will go to London in October, and then continue the tour in support of the 7 Steps of Fresh Air album in Russia.

Pavel Borisov

Riga