The Kino group re-recorded the album “This is not love”: unexpected conclusions

Rock heroes in search of the perfect sound

Members of the Kino group continue to polish up their rock archives and have released a re-recorded version of the album “This Is Not Love”. In their original form, these songs were released in 1985, and if you compare the two sounds separated by almost forty years, unexpected conclusions arise.

“This Is Not Love” is not exactly the “Kino” group that is sometimes usually presented. The era of heroic poster rockers, which began with the album “Blood Group” and established the canonical image of Tsoi, was preceded by a period of musicians’ passion for neo-romanticism. Combined with a very flexible view of the desired studio sound, the songs turned out to be very spontaneous, and almost all recordings of those times were not so much a desire for an ideal as a desire to record ideas here and now.

With fixation, everything was not at all easy. According to the recollections of the participants in the process, they had to record at home, the sound of the guitars “climbed” into the vocal microphone, there was no way to assemble and sound the drum kit, so instead of live drums they used a drum machine. Add to this the rather simple songs, sloppy backing vocals and the occasional desire to quote The Cure and other British mods of the era.

But the result was a very light, sentimental and extremely frank album. This is probably exactly what yesterday’s schoolchildren record, filled with passion for music and the desire to do everything their own way. This is exactly what Tsoi’s comrades were at that time, and their youthful energy overcame all technical flaws. Moreover, sometimes it seems as if these flaws were part of the style, and with them everything sounds much cooler. If we note the songs themselves, then “Spring”, “I Announce My Home”, “Near Me” and of course the title song “This Is Not Love” still sound very fresh and fashionable in their own way.

When re-recording the album, the Kino musicians, of course, had the opportunity to assemble and sound the drums, sort out the microphones and generally do everything they considered necessary, plus use Tsoi’s delicately restored voice. In addition, there is one important detail here. It was not the masters of cover versions who recorded in the studio, but the very same musicians (in this case, Yuri Kasparyan and Alexander Titov) who also worked on the apartment recording forty years ago. They probably understood well what was missing from these songs in the eighties and tried years later to give the album the perfect sound.

The new version sounds more than convincing, but the wow effect that everyone is looking forward to after an upgrade is not stunning in this case. For the most part, the members of Kino managed to preserve the informal nerve of those songs, but in some cases there is a feeling that in the eighties, despite working practically on their knees, the musicians managed to provide almost every track with an indestructible and still self-sufficient charisma.

Commenting on the new versions of old songs, Alexander Tsoi talks about the complete sound picture that was finally created for this album. There is no reason to doubt the opinion of a person inside the process. But we should not forget that such work with archives is a business scheme that the group members now adhere to. And as a scheme, it functions well, allowing many to rediscover the music of Kino.

But in some situations, the most professional sound only emphasizes the energy of youth performances. Especially if the latter involved people who could turn the union of music and words into an ideal marriage.