Vanya Dmitrienko’s first album turned out to be blatantly sad

One of the most interesting albums in February was Vanya Dmitrienko’s release Paranoid. Not an album, but an unbridled celebration of unhappy puberty love from a 17-year-old pop artist, who instantly conquered half the Internet two years ago with the track “Venus – Jupiter”. Turn on.

Since the time of the romantic hit about two planets in the same orbit, Vanya seems to have experienced a series of emotional upheavals, as a result of which the album turned out to be blatantly sad. However, in youth, feelings always get out at full volume, so it is much easier for young talents who move towards the listener at the behest of the soul, and not along the verified producer path, to touch the souls of their audience.

The very first composition “Intro” literally screams suffering into the ears of the listener. Vanya himself admits that for the first time he spoke in such a “screaming” mood. Moreover, the cry into the void turned out to be short, only for one verse-chorus. But the mood of the album is clear. There is only one theme – love, why love, why love and other endless holding hands, when everyone knows that the heart will be broken and the joint plans that are built with such rapture will inevitably be destroyed.

“For four years I have been collecting these compositions from all parts of my brain … the wonderful intercourse of my growing up looks like 11 tracks of my album,” Vanya floridly speaks about his first disc. She was preceded by a number of singles, thanks to which the public formed an opinion about Van as a musician tuned in to rhythmic driving dances, so this almost fatal “wonderful intercourse” was not accepted by all the fans, accustomed to dancing to the music of a starlet, with understanding.

According to Vanya, “Pizza” is the closest song from the entire album to his audience. Indeed, she sounds romantic, light and voluminous and has every chance of becoming the main lingerie at school proms-2023. The track is also ideal for inept performance with a guitar in the entrance with an anguish characteristic of March cats. The cinematic poetic series of “Pizza” instantly immerses us in the atmosphere of a cafe where the girl is waiting and the boy is not coming, but the other boy has already managed to fall in love, seeing her suffering over two slices of pizza that have not been shared with anyone. However, he has nothing to hope for, so while her tea was getting cold, he sailed past the Titanic, and now, in order not to drown in the icy waters of his feelings, he sings this beautiful song to us. Very touching, in the spirit of Japanese anime, the girls in the comments on social networks are delighted.

What follows is a whole series of almost epic tracks about interpersonal relationships in the style of “everything is complicated.” “Baby”, “Green Eyes”, “Paranoid”, which headed the album, are about how paranoid, confused and inconsistent sometimes feelings and thoughts can be. This row is crowned by the old track “Songs about Love”, which Vanya wrote back at the age of 15, asking a childish question why all songs about love are so sad and why do people need these useless relationships that end anyway and cause only pain in the end. Apparently, over the next two years, life explained to the young performer why. Therefore, the album closes with a light and uncomplicated track “Winter” – a song without anguish, glorifying what usually happens with poets in love under the covers.

“Faith” is a song about the only stable relationship – with oneself, of course, and boundless faith in oneself and one’s “texts”, in spite of everything, draws a line under youthful tragedies and shifts the performer’s attention to the gloomy Moscow everyday life. “Moscow at Night” is a track in the 00s rap style, at least that’s how Vanya imagines it. But for that time, both the text and the music sound too refined, but the reading of the couplets really turned out to be quite similar. The artist says that he always wanted to work in that style, and now, finally, he succeeded.

Known for his covers of popular artists, Vanya remained true to himself and included two foreign hits on the album. First, the blockbuster “31st Spring” from “Night Snipers”, which he called “a wonderful product that they just took a little singing.” And secondly, the track “220” from “Tatu”, covered, supplemented and remade especially for last year’s tribute show of the group. “I already have about 150 covers, in principle it is interesting for me to remake songs in my own way, it’s always cool,” Vanya said in an interview for ZD.

In general, the album leaves a rather pleasant, non-plastic feeling after listening. One can even say that with this work Dmitrienko takes us back to those long-forgotten romantic times, when there were no passing songs on the discs, written for the masses around one hit. For a pop artist, the disc sounds extremely fatal and unusual, which is why it is interesting.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 28980 dated March 1, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Coition puberty