Digest of our music: March

An interesting collision of intonations occurs on the second album of St. Petersburg Quintet of Shortparis - here the European arthouse psychodrama is voiced by a pulsating electronic soundtrack, as if the title event from the film of Thomas Winterberg “The Triumph” would suddenly rethink in the spirit of Gaspar Noe. There are, however, the nuances - electronic pulsations do not mean at all that Shortparis are fond of dance music or technology; Rather, with the help of mainly electronic tools, they reproduce something like an assertive and concentrated post-punk. “There are, however, the nuances” - a phrase that will come in handy more than once in any conversation about Shortparis , a group that can extremely cleverly maneuver between familiar flags. For example, the theatrical and gener vocals of Nikolai Komyagin, masterfully taking out the soul, will easily remind both Jamie Stuart from the Xiu Xiu , and the Chris Corner from Iamx - Shortparis colleagues to wrap high drama for pulsating electricity-but at the same time there are no hysterical shortparis songs in the songs of Shortparis. The separation of the first, nor vicious romance of the second. Petersburgers are simultaneously hyperemotional and disciplined, violent and restrained; Their drama was built not so much on catharsis as on constant pumping of tension, as if the pulse they voiced in the head of a person who is being voiced, who is experiencing something incredibly dramatic, but at the same time he stands silently in the corner, clenching his fists and biting lips. With catharsis, however (well, here again), everything is also cunning-it is mainly not put into a substantive, but in the instrumental plane of songs, such as, for example, in the opening “love”, where an irresistible combination of a grinding synthesizer party, bass riff and frantic percussion, or in Novokuznetsk, and ascending the shock, ascending to the shock, sounds. drum climax. A sort of separation becomes as a result of a key voltage point for the entire plate - it seems that the drama of Shortparis protagonists finds permission only in their fantasies, and from this the Easter album becomes even more powerful.