Lazarev, Seryabkina, Gazmanov sang New Year’s songs not without exhaustion

The closer to the New Year, the more interesting it is to flip through new music. Every now and then, fresh holiday singles flicker, and in recent days there has already been a grandiose snowfall of winter songs. The first gust of icy wind hit the listener with pop singer Sergei Lazarev, followed by Olga Seryabkina, Oleg Gazmanov and other artists in felt boots and with ice sleds at the ready. Finally, you can listen to new New Year’s songs for 2023.

Sergey Lazarev and Eva Vlasova premiered a video for a joint song. Throughout the video, they are sitting with emotionless faces (apparently depicting the ice of feelings) either in a retro car or on a retro bench in beautiful retro clothes, and they are covered with non-melting cinematic snow, which so mercifully does not spoil either makeup or clothes . This, of course, preserves all the beauty in the frame, but purely psychologically it makes one doubt that the people on the screen belong to a biological life form. The ice of their feelings seems to freeze the artists physically as well. In hot countries, this video could be popular, even through the screen it has a cooling effect. Interestingly, a year ago, Sergei also released a single about the coldness of feelings “Snow in the Ocean.” But then both the video and the song were more difficult to perform. And in fact the same thing – ice in the heart and a city in which love does not live. Hmmm … “Love does not live here anymore” – Vlad Stashevsky seems to be hiccuping, of good memory. If Sergey began to repeat himself (which had not been noticed before, by the way), the thought legitimately creeps in, will we really see the New Year’s duet of Sergey Lazarev with Vlad Topalov again, with which the defunct Smash group, reunited on the occasion of the 20th anniversary, pleased its 40th summer fangirls… But judging by the fact that, apart from the New Year’s song, the pop duo hasn’t given birth to anything in the entire anniversary year, there’s not much to look forward to. And from this sadness, New Year’s ice even more fetters feelings …

Singer Olga Seryabkina released a mini-album “Winter”, dedicated exclusively to the New Year. The first song illustrates the singer’s hopes that next year will be better than the previous one. “Let the year be better,” the artist, who claims to be a fashionable dance thing, asks sadly and somehow mournfully into eternity. And her call is quite relevant, given that New Year’s events have been canceled this time and the artists were left without their usual earnings at corporate parties, due to which many of them could decently live for a year. But Seryabkina, it seems, is hinting not at the absence of corporate parties, but at the general bleak situation as a whole. This is followed by a song with children’s “Wishlist” of her son regarding gifts, and the next two songs are dedicated to the realization of a real female desire for great and great love. This micro-album ends with the New Year’s hymn “Time to Give Love”, an atmospheric dance round dance song about a fairy tale, faith in miracles, lights and magic, with a decorated Christmas tree and the ringing of bells. As Olga promised in our interview with ZD some time ago, she really becomes one of the most interesting and original singers on the Russian stage. After leaving Silver and breaking up with Max Fadeev, her solo career sounded brighter and stronger, despite the mournful zigzag at the beginning of the new mini-album.

Kazakhstani performer Mona Songz presented lovers of high-quality pop music with the most tender song “Snow Flakes” about whirling snowflakes, assurances of love and dreams coming true, the very ones that Olga Seryabkina sings about, and which even Sergey Lazarev implies in his tragic winter songs. Mona Songz (Manarbek Zhumatai in the world) made a minimalist song, graceful as a snowflake flying in the luminous flux of a lantern, once again reminding his stage colleagues that sometimes simplicity speaks much better about the main thing than multi-tiered arrangements and other pompous attempts from expensive sound producers. To the company of Manarbek, you can add the New Year’s playlist of the St. Petersburg musician Ivan Reis with his cutest version of Jingle Bells, at the beginning of which he touchingly reminds of the heart, of childhood and calls to believe that everything will be fine …

It just so happened that the Christmas holiday is attached to the New Year in the public mind with superglue. The Catholic smoothly flows into the change of the calendar under the chiming clock and closes with Orthodox prayers on a giant biblical star. Songs, respectively, are also all mixed. This year, indie singer Zhenya Lyubich presented her version of the Christmas nativity scene – “It doesn’t matter what was around, and it doesn’t matter …” A free retelling of the sacred sacrament of birth (not only a deity, but also a new life in principle) in a warm guitar sound with unchanged high notes of keys and string ringing, which is used to illustrate snowfalls and magic of various levels in music, create a multi-layered cocktail of an ideal Christmas song, performed to children’s non-alcoholic mulled wine by the fireplace. Obviously, that track was written not for a marketing show, but from Zhenya’s beautiful and kind musical soul, who simply loves to sing about snowfalls, long winter, magic and New Year’s wishes.

In the same theme of hopes for a good future expressed at the Christmas tree, the Chelyabinsk indie band Fizica released the single “At the end of the calendar”. “A bright serpentine tied us together, because on this day no one should be alone” – the most intricate line so far this year using New Year’s holiday paraphernalia, which was issued by Russian artists.

True, there is also a line from Oleg Gazmanov’s fresh, crispy from frost, snow single “Happy New Year!”: “Let this holiday sparkle with dew in the eyes as in childhood” … Apparently, they meant tears of happiness or the reflection in the eyes of people of festive lights garlands? Or something else? But at the combination of the words “dew” and “eye”, the cultural memory of a Russian person instantly takes out of his pocket the proverb about “God’s dew”, which, of course, has nothing to do with the aesthetics and spirit of the New Year. And it would probably be more logical for fireworks to “sparkle” than for dew, this is a fiery image … In general, in the field of poetry in our pop music, as usual, there is still room for improvement. And not only in poetry. What, apparently, the artists of the epic group “Disco Crash” thought with well-deserved satisfaction, cunningly purring under their breath the old “New Year’s”, which, it seems, even after epochs, still remains the pinnacle of the heights of the monitored subject matter of the genre: many but haven’t been able to get it yet…

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28937 dated December 21, 2022

Newspaper headline:
New Christmas tree hits 2023: dew, snowflakes and dreams