Yuri Shevchuk released a new album “Wolves in the dash”

On digital platforms, the album by Yuri Shevchuk and Dmitry Emelyanov “Wolves in the Shooting Range” was released. The leader of the DDT group attracted a young but already successful musician to work in order, in his own words, to find new intonations. I was looking for them in the new album Igor Gavrilov.

The last year in the life of the DDT group was devoted to getting used to the status of a “banned group”. In May 2022, when the concerts of domestic rock and rap artists were canceled one after another, and some of them were already actively touring abroad, posters of a big DDT concert dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the group were still hanging at public transport stops in Moscow. It was supposed to take place on June 10 at the Otkritie stadium.

The group managed to play several concerts as part of the anniversary tour, but then cancellations began – in Moscow, Voronezh, St. Petersburg and other cities. Yuri Shevchuk was fined for discrediting the army. While under siege, the band continued to release music nonetheless. In the fall of 2022, the second part of the album “Creativity in the Void” was released, new video clips appeared one after another. In February 2023, the video “Motherland, Come Home” appeared on the DDT YouTube channel. The authorship of the song was indicated as follows: “Yuri Shevchuk, Dmitry Emelyanov.”

Dmitry Emelyanov is a guitarist, long-term colleague and co-author of Zemfira Ramazanova (recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation), as well as a sought-after film composer. Yuri Shevchuk explains his appearance as a partner as follows: “The DDT group is in good health, but sometimes (musicians will understand me) you want some other sound, sound, work with other musicians, find new intonations. And so it happened. New material found us with Dmitry Emelyanov.

Even before the release of the joint album “Wolves in the Shooting Range”, the musicians filmed the first and last songs of the album – “Motherland, Come Home” and “Funeral of War”.

There was no doubt about the subject matter of the new material. “Rodina, come back home” is the “entrance” to the space of songs filled with both drama and lyrics, which at first glance could not have been written at another time. This song seems to plunge the listener into the viscous, foul-smelling matter of the “fierce spring”: “The village is empty, Ryazan is drinking from the Dnieper. From the wreaths it blossomed, in the red clay – a hole. The song naturally resonates with the material of Vladi’s latest solo album (Vladislav Leshkevich from Casta) “February lasts”, only the Rostovite said: “How is it, …, perhaps?”, And the St. Petersburg intellectual, referring to his homeland, formulates more subtly: “Temen my age. Lord, how did it all happen?! Your torn face. I got stuck and forgot.”

The second in the album “Wolves in the shooting range” is his title track. DDT fans are already discussing how much the lyrics have changed compared to the version that was played at DDT concerts in the mid-2010s. The most attentive of the fans remembered that at that time the musician dedicated it to the memory of Yegor Letov.

“From the very beginning of work, we agreed with Dima that we wanted to achieve analog tube sound in the style of the 70s. We were united by love for the dawn of real rock music,” writes Yuri Shevchuk in the preface posted on social networks and digital platforms. However, the arrangement of the song “Wolves in the Shooting Range” is much closer to the “Kino” group than to the rock of the 1970s. And in any case, the songs of the album, loaded with sharp associations and sharp metaphors, make us perceive it primarily as a hyperliterary opus tied to Shevchuk’s poems. Some of them were so important to him that they became available to the public in the original, text version before they formed the basis of the songs. Such, for example, are “Dron” and “Hope”.

In “Drone”, the lyrics and simple chords, ascending in their mood to Shevchuk’s “table acoustics”, are addressed by the hero of the song to a friend lying in a hospital bed with a ventilator. They turn into another diagnosis of civilization from those that regularly come out from Shevchuk’s pen: “The universe is standing in the subway, surrounded by a blind crowd. How to explain to these backs that everyone has it? “Hope” literally tells about the funeral of hope, and this state can be cured, probably, only by the final album “Funeral of War”.

For the song “Dancing”, a dance rhythm unusual in the context of DDT songs was chosen, and a certain “uncle” obsessed with his ego was chosen as the central character. His favorite gadget is a cudgel. It is quite natural that listeners look for his prototypes in real life – the song is full of allusions. But it is also interesting how, within the framework of one song, Shevchuk and Yemelyanov coexist with a gloomy disco, pathos chorus and spoken word.

The most surprising thing is that Yuri Shevchuk allows himself such experiments within the framework of the DDT group. Ever since the mid-1990s, he has been regularly pushing these limits, just to get away from the inertia of his most popular songs – about autumn, etc. So, Dmitry Emelyanov is hardly attracted to the recording of the album only as a person with rich musical erudition. Here we can rather talk about the case of The Smile group. Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood created this side project, realizing that the public expects a big step forward from each Radiohead album, epoch-making experiments and new trends. And they just wanted to play songs. By a strange coincidence, describing his new album, Shevchuk says: “Dima is well done, good sound, and on my part in it (album.— “b”) nothing special, songs. These songs, in which “there is nothing special”, again want to be parsed into quotes.