Billy’s Band describes the meaninglessness of existence in their new album
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Billy Novik on an emotional swing in a cacophony of styles
Over the weekend, Billy Novik, a St. Petersburg musician and leader of Billy’s Band, celebrated his birthday in one of the Moscow clubs, simultaneously presenting his band’s seventh studio album. They didn’t release discs for five years, but now discs, vinyls, and even “old-fashioned” cassettes with the new album “In the Hat” began to sound in kitchens and cars, where the older generation especially loves to listen to music. Billy had just turned 48 years old; for a blues musician, frankly speaking, this age is almost youthful.
Throughout his musical career, starting in the early 2000s, Billy intelligently wore a hat, maintaining his personal style of elegant rumpled hair with a slight stubble and poetic charm. Finally, almost 20 years later, an album appeared, the name of which honestly reflects the artist’s creative path – “In the Hat”. As Billy says, “a hat brings success to its owner.” Well, or at least protection from colds on chilly northern days.
The disc consists of 14 compositions, although initially they planned to release 15, but they had to shrink due to the fact that all the musical belongings did not fit on physical media, especially on tape cassettes. One song was postponed for the future, and it has already begun to attract new material “from the universe” (as it is now fashionable to say) for the next album.
Some singles from this record were released in advance to warm up the public’s interest – four songs during the year before the release of the long-awaited album, one after another, showed the listener what was cooking in Billy’s musical kitchen. For example, the track “Old-Fashioned,” which opens the disc and immediately immerses you in the atmosphere of night St. Petersburg (precisely St. Petersburg, as tourers who come to the cultural capital for weekend alcoholic adventures especially like to call it – that is, in two words: “Drink in St. Petersburg” although, sorry, this is no longer Billy, but in this case the thoughts converged significantly). An alluring image of the historical center of “Petra Creation”, moistened by permanent light rain, with its intricate, confusing routes through secret semi-basement bars and constant bridges across the numerous water arteries of the Northern capital, is immediately drawn.
Further, the sad spirit of the record wandering around the city intensifies and turns love’s longing to the maximum in the heartbreaking track “Imagining.” The female image, permeated with chills in the darkness, does not allow the musician’s rushing nature to live in peace, and this whole plot actively resembles Blok’s stranger breathing “spirits and mists” with her hysterical “truth in wine.” It would seem that then everything should be even worse and the blues mood should be completely trampled into the dust of suffering, but the first love triangle of songs closes with the joyful track “Lanterns” with a daring hymn to a cheerful existence together in the St. Petersburg rain. How the frontmen described the mood of the album – emotional swing. “Everything is bad, then everything is good, like emotionally disturbed people,” he outlined this feature in a conversation about the new record.
According to the logic of the “swing,” what follows is a rhythmic, noisy track, sad, but thoroughly imbued with self-irony “Mom, take it,” screaming with anguish in the style of Kurt Cobain. After this, a slow descent down the mood ladder begins. Through the loser who admits his impotence in “Purely by Chance,” the lyrical hero goes to the bottom in his boat, overflowing with various drinks in the track “By Name.” By the eighth song, “I will tell you with the last emptiness,” the moral spirit of the hero, and with him the listener, finds itself at the very bottom, on which it is unlikely that anyone will knock from below, and everything that happens dissolves into black holes of the meaninglessness of existence itself.
The second half of the record can only be listened to by those who have survived the first dose of emotional swing. But here there is an inevitable ascent, as if up a flight of stairs, to the measured blues bloom-bloom of Billy Novik’s double bass. Listeners are covered with nostalgic memories from the past: either Chet Baker’s gentle jazz from the 50s pops up in the multi-layered story “Where Are You”, then music from the films of the French new wave of the 60s and 70s with the prowess of early rock and roll bands in “Me” dreamed” and “Equally”, then the pathos of the 80s in the track “Star over Kupchino”, then the whisper of piano romances of the 30s in “Not for Me”. “It’s Raining on Nekrasov Street” looks like a mix of “Moscow Windows”, early Rosembaum and all the non-thief “decent” chanson from the 90s. All this, of course, is impossible to listen to without smiling and a drunken choir in the background.
“Optimism through clenched teeth,” Billy Novik characterizes what he ended up with “In the Hat.” But, despite the cacophony of different musical styles and moods, the album turned out to be integral and seasoned, like a good tart drink with a masculine degree – warming, cozy and reckless just enough to remain unpunished “after everything” that happened.
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Billy’s Band described the meaninglessness of existence
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