House with destiny – Kommersant newspaper No. 172 (7373) of 09/17/2022

In the year of the 50th anniversary of the Aquarium group, its big anniversary tour in Russia was planned. In March, the leader of the group, Boris Grebenshchikov, announced that all the group’s concerts in their homeland were postponed “until better times.” Now the musician, alone or accompanied by members of the group, plays around the world, performing, among other things, songs from the new album “The House of All Saints”, which has just appeared on digital platforms. About the album – Boris Barabanov.

If anyone should not ask the question of what he has been doing for the past eight years, it is Boris Grebenshchikov. He was busy with work – he created a trilogy consisting of the albums “Salt” (2014), “Time N” (2018) and “Sign of Fire” (2020), in which he described in the most merciless way how ancient rot and scum rises to the surface of life And how hard it is to resist. As it turned out now, when creating the “Harvest Festival in the Palace of Labor”, “Shakuhachi” and “Songs of the Unloved”, the musician wrote not hypothetical script songs, but a chronicle. Prophetic from beginning to end was the song from the album “Sign of Fire” “Not Fate”, in the chorus of which it said: “A storm is approaching that will tear the very essence of being.”

The new album “House of All Saints” appeared inside the song “Not Fate”, which became a reality. At the same time, “House of All Saints” is not an album by BG, it is an album by Aquarium. Where lies the border between the work of “Aquarium” and solo recordings of Boris Grebenshchikov, the musician is constantly asked, and he always finds something to answer. In All Saints’ House, the answer is obvious.

If in solo albums Boris Grebenshchikov focuses to a large extent on his own experiences and puts them into a relatively strict form (of course, adjusted for the passion to involve favorite musicians from all over the world in recording), then the new Aquarium album is 15 tracks of the broadest stylistic and instrumental spectrum.

This feeling of involvement of both the author and the listener in “something more” is completely intuitive and on the new album it is all-encompassing.

In football, there is not a single match without “set pieces” – corner kick, goal kick, free kick, penalty kick. “The House of All Saints” largely consists of “standard positions”, well known to all fans of the “Aquarium”. There is an introductory and final instrumental piece – “Portal (Entrance)” and “Portal (Exit)”. There is a waltz “Wine from the Sand” and reggae “Don’t go out the door.” And then there is the “standard position” “Russian Bob Dylan” – “The House of All Saints.” As in the classic Aquarium albums, there are two songs with absurd lyrics in the style of George Gunitsky – “Great Serpent” and “Surprise”. “In style” – because the texts belong to the pen of BG. As he told Kommersant, “George and I competed in writing such poems from the fifth grade.” Attentive listeners will find in the Aquarium back catalog prequels of many songs from The House of All Saints.

But Boris Grebenshchikov, as a player who each time performs “set pieces” in a new way, reinvents his standards anew. In “Wine from the Sand”, made, as it were, in the image and likeness of “Garson # 2”, a new dimension arises, thanks to the polyphony of the Georgian group “Mgzavrebi”. And in the song “Mahamaya”, which continues the “epic” tradition in the “Aquarium” catalog, the harp of the musician from Pskov Olga Glazova side by side with the violin of the folk star Eliza Carty. In such combinations, today’s “feeling of the “Aquarium”” is born.

A powerful source of song energy for Boris Grebenshchikov is his own “Russian Album” (1992). Then, turning to archetypal Russian folklore, he formulated a new self and a new “Aquarium”. For 30 years, echoes of this gloomy post-Bashlachev acoustics have been heard in his songs, and it is also present in the House of All Saints.

First of all – in the 12-minute epic “Mahamaya”, evoking the “Horses of Mayhem” and “Wolves and Ravens”.

In folklore there is the concept of “suffering” – drawn out monophonic songs about misfortunes, mostly family ones. In Grebenshchikov’s endless Russian cycle “Mahamaya” that has been going on since the last century, this is an Indian epic, a Scandinavian saga, a Volga dark folk, and all in an endless circle of suffering, both in Russian and in the Buddhist sense of the word: “Here is the road post in an open field, the path from one hell to another.

In the “Russian” vein, the two best songs of the album “Vorozhba” and “Resentment” are sustained. “Divination” is the only thing published in the album that was written after February 24, 2022. It’s hard to believe (“And we would sit together, it would be chilly for us – so open the door to the oven. And from the stove there was a bang – three bears with sawn-off shotguns outside the outskirts. And it became hard to say how stuffy” (“Mahamaya”) – this is written “ before”. “The world is crossed in two with a line of fire, the world is already smoldering” (“To the Kings of Falling Leaves”) – and this too). “Divination” is an instantaneous and precise reaction of the poet, a witchcraft spell and a sharp, knocking electric guitar solo against the background of the flute theme. The sound of “Divination” is like an inversion trace of “Fighter”, which returned to the concert sets of “Aquarium” in recent years. “Resentment”, resolved at the junction of Indian music and Irish folk, gets stuck in the throat from a feeling of an insoluble contradiction between the universal harmony and the very fact of the presence of man on Earth. We have never learned to live in peace with the planet and with each other, and we are not even trying.

But there are two songs in the album that give the listener, if not hope for saving the world, then at least a feeling of instant happiness – “Agatha’s Song” and “Heretic”. From these songs with the mood of a children’s fairy tale, the effect came out encouraging and healing.