Life argues with death in the new album “Va-Bank”: sea and Cossack songs intertwine
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Looking at the new musical releases of spring, it is impossible not to highlight the album “Gold and Blood” by the group “Va-Bank”. The team led by Alexander F. Sklyar demonstrates that canonical Moscow rock is in excellent condition: not only is it breathing with might and main, but it is also taking a Cossack flank with a saber, and is making plans for the future of work.
The disc contains ten songs, connected into a dense musical fabric by common themes and a powerful rock message. It sounds like an adult, thinking, feeling and sensitively reacting to what is happening around him, harsh male rock with heavy guitars, but with a choir, balalaikas and interspersed with country and Irish melodies. According to the deep nature of “Va-Bank”, sea and Cossack songs, laborious and darkly colored searches for truth at the very bottom of the soul are intertwined here. The noir nature of the group became one of the main features in the original charisma of the group.
It all starts with the song “Forward, friends,” with clear drums and a graphic rhythm guitar pattern. This is the labor anthem about the hard work that will be done. The second track “Black Candle” is one of the main signature songs of the group last season, released as a single long before the album. Alexander F. Sklyar made it together with rapper Rich, and a black and white video was shot for it. The main play of the image is based on the distortion of silhouettes, which are reflected in the glossy surfaces of musical instruments, as if the heroes were in the kingdom of crooked mirrors.
The song also echoes other plots of “Va-Bank”, in which Sklyar goes into depth, exploring the borderline states of personality or revealing the mystical aspects of life. It is reminiscent of the work of the group from the time of “Sklif” and the entire album “Nizhnyaya Tundra” as a whole, when a person encounters the blackest and gloomiest in himself. “Black Candle” also echoes the song “Vasya Conscience,” one of the most important in all of the group’s later work. The character gives evil criminals what they deserve, acting as the people’s avenger. Only the hero of “Black Candle,” on the contrary, chooses the dark path, the side of evil, on which he is comfortable and profitable. Here there are terrible, gloomy lines about dancing on decorated graves and about rivers of blood, but in the finale there is a natural expectation of retribution.
According to the internal logic of the record, what follows are two tracks about a possible imminent death, but it does not happen, the hero defeats it with his vitality. The track “Death Fish” was also released earlier, and a marine-themed video was edited for it, in which Sklyar, of course, is in a vest and on a ship. Sailors’ songs are also his native territory, with their characteristic booming melodies and drawn-out lyrics. The Cossack song “When We Were at War” has also long been present in the group’s repertoire. Death in different forms circles both the sailor and the Cossack, but so far has no power over them.
Next is the convict song “Hole on the Hill,” another creepy story about life and death, which everyone achieves through their own hard work. The theme of deep moral choice arises again, just like in the hit “Hell and Heaven,” where it is indicated that there is no middle ground between a dream and self-betrayal and one cannot be half honest.
Well, then one of the most mysterious songs for the local public is “Erebus” and “Terror”. The story is about two English ships that set off to conquer the northern seas. We are talking about John Franklin’s expedition of 1845, which disappeared without a trace in the Arctic and was searched for for half a century until the graves and remains of the crew members’ belongings were discovered. Only in 2014 were the remains of the Erebus found and in 2016 – the Terror. The British media presented Sir Franklin as a hero, despite the failure of the expedition and the terrible death of the crew from serious illnesses and cases of cannibalism. Many poems were written about this story and many different works of art were created. But unlike them, in the song A.F. Sklyara Franklin says goodbye to his sailors and admits that it was he who destroyed them and “instead of glory he deserved contempt and shame.” This is the longest song on the album at six minutes.
The next track, the seventh, is about communication with the Teacher and questions that everyone must answer for themselves: about betrayal and the end of the path. It was written for a film about sambo, but in the body of the album it sounds like the dying song of one of the sailors who died in the Arctic. The track “Solombala” supports the Arctic theme. This is the historical district of Arkhangelsk, the port from which the ship of the hero, who has dreamed of the sea all his life, departs. The song is about how northern seascapes reflect a sense of freedom and eternal life.
It is not surprising that it is followed by the track “Honor by Honor” – an old original song by Alexander F. Sklyar, stylized as a Cossack “folk song”, one of “Vasya’s Favorite Songs Conscience”. Rhyming with “When We Were At War,” it sets the album’s rollicking military tone. The album ends with the track “Dubinushka” based on the traditional text by Vasily Bogdanov, who took the chorus from the Volga barge haulers. This, of course, echoes the first song of the album, “Forward, Friends.” Thus, the circle closes, and a ring composition is formed in which death is tightly intertwined with life, love, war and the various paths of the heroes’ wanderings.
Newspaper headline:
Circles of Hell according to Sklyar
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