How to Skank in St Petersburg + Gig Review: Alai Oli

Lazy Lois speaking, leaving a gig review till 2 days after the gig :$

It seems to me that, much like in London, if you want to know where the good ska, punk and reggae gigs are going to be you've got to find the clubs that put them on and go trailing through their listings. So far I have found:

• Club A2 - a2.fm
• Club Avrora - avrora-zal.ru
• Club Dusche - (The place for ska-punk) - dusche.ru 
• Zal Ozhidaniya (lit The Waiting Room) - (more Rock & Metal) - clubzal.com 

These seem to be the places putting on the almost majority of the bands I want to see (with the exception of Leningrad playing a show at the Ice Palace arena, which is a bit big for most alternative music I'd guess). If you know of any others please let me know in the comments!

Oooh, thanks to researching this article I've discovered the St Petersburg Ska-Jazz review! Wow! I know what I'll be doing next Saturday now :D

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SO! I went to an incredible gig on Friday night, on International Women's Day. There were 2 female-fronted bands playing, I don't know if that was a deliberate Women's Day thing but if not it was a good coincidence.

I didn't know there was going to be a support act, so I got a nice surprise when I turned up to find Monroe already on the stage. They call themselves punk-rock, but I think they're more pop-punk-rock. Think like a Russian Paramore, but not shit like Paramore (Oh alright, Misery Business and some of their singles are ok, the rest is dreadfully boring filler). They seem relatively new, only having an EP out and an album release show at the end of the month, but their songs are slick, catchy and fun. They're energetic, fun stuff and I have high hopes for their full-length release - for now there's a few songs for free download on their site here. Plus they did a cover of Against Me's I Was A Teenage Anarchist and that won my heart a bit :P

I had never heard of Alai Oli (Алай Оли) until I came here and went looking through Club A2's listings, which is ridiculous because they play exactly the sort of Reggae-Rock which is ludicrously listenable at any time of day, in any kind of mood. They've got fast songs, slow songs, funny songs, super-sarcastic songs, anti-racist anti-nazi songs, happy songs, sad songs. Everything. Which makes for an excellent gig when the band know how to get all of that into an evening and put on a great show. The lead singer Ol'ga has a great voice and is a very energetic front woman despite being heavily pregnant (heavily pregnant and still jumping about on stage, that is baby is going to learn to skank before it can walk!).

Picture by Alina Pasok, more here

Highlights of the gig for me were jumping up and down with the vast majority of the A2 hall; the mass fist-pumping (or what do you call that when you all bop your open, face-down palms up and down in the air? You know what I mean) during Воруй-Убивай Регги; and the touching ballad during for which Ol'ga got everyone to go deadly silent.

An audience member pointed out "Where's the trumpet?": the regular trumpet-player was in Germany as he's emigrated to live with his family. As far as the gig went the music still sounded great and not too much lacking - there was one song during which everyone was singing the trumpet part which was cute. They said they'll get a fill-in in future, but who knows when that'll be because the band is expected to take a break for what is effectively maternity leave.

***** - 5 stars, or a swear-word censored?

If every gig is like Friday night, and I go to one a week, I think I'll get by here just fine!
*dances off*

x

Edit: For those interested I found the link to this torrent on their official website, they give all their downloads away for free or pay-what-you-want. Or you can go clicking around on their website's music section and clicking "Скачать альбом" where you see it, which will give you a normal download if you don't like torrenting. I asked their merch guy where I could buy CDs but he said "Only in this one shop in Moscow", gutted!

Gig review: Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra

In an effort to have an adventure and stop feeling like the only one not having any fun (you can have the Reel Big Fish quote for free), I decided to splash out 1500 rubles/ £32 on a ticket to see Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra at A2 last night.

I also went because Emir Kusturica is a very famous and cool director from Serbia. He is probably best known for Life is a Miracle and Black Cat, White Cat, but I got to know of him through a module I took at uni on how the Balkan wars were portrayed though film, in which we watched Underground. I expected the live show to be as crazy as his films (read: very).

Unza Unza Time by Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra

A little bit about the Russian gig experience: it's weird. Club A2 isn't too much of a pain to get to, but now the nearest tube is shut the simplest way to get there seemed to be to walk 25 minutes from the next-nearest tube, so I guess that's like walking from Mornington Crescent to Chalk Farm to get to the Camden Barfly. That's after I've walked the 20 minutes to Sennaya Square tube on my end and stayed on that for a quick 10 minutes. A2's Mir is a medium-sized venue, maybe the size of Koko/ Islington Academy in London, a bit smaller than Nottingham's Rock City. It's clearly used for clubs because the upstairs VIP section has a separate entrance and is furnished with sofas. Read that as the upstairs has zero atmosphere. Downstairs wasn't that great either, maybe due to this band being not super-famous or super-cool: there was the odd girl or couple jumping and dancing but 95% of people were stood stock still, unless there was clapping required, which happened a lot. In that case it seems the majority can seem to muster the energy to put their palms together. Russians really dress up for gigs, I knew once I'd got there that nobody had come to do anything energetic as the girls were wearing high-heels and a lot of slap.

The reason Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra aren't very danceable is because they lose momentum constantly. The gig started out slow, and between numbers they always went back to riffing on the Pink Panther theme, slowing everything down, sort of destroying any dancing momentum they'd built up. It was more like a sort of cabaret or circus in parts; they got about 15 girls up on stage to dance and then Kusturica asked them to copy him. Queue conga-line around the stage and making them all do press-ups. It was pretty funny actually. The violinist was dressed in a sort of graduate's robe which is later removed to reveal layer upon layer of dresses. Bizarre. At one point he put his bow in Kusturica's shoe and played his violin like that, but holding it against the bow. Things just got weirder and weirder really. There were light-up spinning guitars, kazoo battles, a member of the audience picked out and then serenaded and waltzed about on stage. It was just... so very Emir Kusturica.

Sure the music they play is called a mix of Balkan folk/gypsy/rock/jazz. The Guardian described them as playing "some of the world’s wildest, most joyous and most unrestrained music", and apparently when they played that Glasgow Concert Hall the security were starting to panic. Not a chance of that in A2, more a risk that everyone was going to fall asleep. I can't even point my finger at exactly what it was: the unenthusiastic crowd, the soulless venue, the music wild but failing to keep up the tempo, this gig was not great. It was just OK.

3 stars, actually 2.5 because of the poor value-for-money. I wouldn't pay £32 for a gig of that size even in central London.