By Charlie Bertsch
Even if you hadn’t heard that Belarussian band Molchat Doma had relocated to Los Angeles, the sound of their impressive new album Belaya Polosa (White Stripe) would tip you off.
While Belaya Polosa consolidates the strengths of their three previous albums, it also marks a significant departure.
The bleak existentialism that made Molchat Doma a standard-bearer for the Russian Doomer aesthetic persists.
But, whereas their music used to communicate the claustrophobia of a totalitarian regime where progress feels impossible, now it conveys the melancholy of a life in exile.
Constraints have given way to the terrifying vastness of possibility.
Molchat Doma’s fidelity to their native Russian language testifies to the anxiety of dislocation.
While they concede Western audiences by providing Romanised spelling alongside the Cyrillic alphabet, they do not translate their lyrics into English.
Maybe one day, they will join famous expatriates like Vladimir Nabokov in bending the English language to their will. For now, their songs remain proudly Russian, even if Moscow and its ally Belarus inspire less positive feelings.
My first impression of Belaya Polosa was that it confirms the band’s shift from the Joy Division-like sound of their first two albums to something more like New Order.
But when I listened to their previous records in sequence, it became apparent that this transformation was less dramatic than I initially believed.
Yes, Belaya Polosa sounds more “Eighties” in that hard-to-pin-down way that people who lived through that decade will readily perceive. However, this has more to do with the new album’s production values than the songwriting.
Belaya Polosa is more sonically expansive. It lacks the tinny quality which characterised their first album in particular. No matter the melody or instrumentation, the music hits differently.
Although the keyboards and drums on Belaya Polosa still have the brittle quality characterised by so much electronic popular music of the early 1980s, there is more room to manoeuvre within the tracks on the new album.
This spaciousness correlates with the band’s surprising global success and the relocation it made possible.
Like many people who grew up in the 1980s, I learned to associate this approach to production with softening. When a band has the resources to sound better, it makes their music, if not objectively worse, less satisfying for those who crave an edge.
Yet the more I listen to Belaya Polosa, the less I find this to be true. It goes as hard as its predecessors, and the music is more consistently intriguing.
Many recent bands have demonstrated an affection for the electronic post-punk sound now branded as “dark wave”. What sets Molchat Doma apart is the conviction that underlies their music.
Although their work conveys nostalgia for the early 1980s, it isn’t a superficial nostalgia trip.
This is where Molchat Doma’s insistence on using the Russian language looms largest.
Even if the English translation of their lyrics sounds similar to those of Ian Curtis or Robert Smith, they call to Western listeners from far away.
To my mind, the most significant change in the band’s sound since their 2017 debut is the evolution of Egor Shkutko’s singing voice.
Although songwriter, multi-instrumentalist Roman Komogortsev and bassist and synth player Pavel Kozlov sound better now, their contribution to the band has been consistent.
Shkutko, by contrast, has gone from sounding like New Order’s Bernard Sumner when he hesitantly took the microphone after Ian Curtis’s suicide to something like a Russian-language Morrissey, but without the toxic politics.
I got to experience this first hand in April 2023 when I saw Molchat Doma perform in my home of Tucson, Arizona. The vocals for songs from their first two albums were dramatically superior to the ones on the studio recordings.
The way Shkutko sings now draws attention to an aspect of electronic pop music from the early 1980s that has not received as much attention as its digital aspect.
There is frequently a powerful tension between the aggressively electronic instrumentation and the histrionically human quality of the vocals.
Shkutko often sings behind the beat, extending a line so long that the note lingers into the next bar. Whereas the instrumental music pushes forward in a very regular, even metronomic way, his voice seems to resist that forward progress, holding it back in favour of something that can’t be translated into zeroes and ones.
I used to think that Molchat Doma’s devotion to sounds from the early 1980s reflects a desire to acknowledge the uneven aesthetic development of the Eastern Bloc, whose impact continues to be felt today.
Perhaps a better way of putting things is that the band have used that particularly Eastern experience to make music that pays heed to a problem that besets the West every bit as much.
Because we are all reliving the early 1980s in ironic form right now, as the dream of technological innovation keeps turning into a nightmare in which progress has become decoupled from human development.
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Photograph courtesy of Jana Shnipelson. Published under a Creative Commons license.