(Show preview) found out about this show yesterday, after someone sent the flyer over. They were emailing us to let us know about the other act in the show Chris Carlson (who I am sure is wonderful too) but the real nugget of joy in here is Alina Simone. Alina, who now resides in NY, was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, and moved to The US when she was just a little girl.
Now a decade or two later, and after a pretty good, if sometimes achingly spare first album “Placelessness” she went (some may say “back to her genetic roots”) and recorded what is probably one of the more haunting albums (out this week) you’ll hear all year: her Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, is a collection of cover songs (plus four originals) from underground Russian punk-folk singer Yanka Dyagileva, whose life and career is stuff of legend out east (much like Nick Drake, she died young and mysteriously, at 24, in the cold depths of Siberia) who is virtually unknown to the western world. Taking something like this (and someone’s demons) on is a scary task, but Alina succeeds sadly and beautifully. As I said-I wish we could have done a listening party for this, because it is definitely something I would want to read. Everyone is talking about it, and so should you (and if you’re Michael, you may actuallly fall in love).

(Live show review) This Tuesday, I returned from a 2 month trip to St. Petersburg, Russia. The next day, I read Svetlana’s article suggesting that the BYT community not miss out on the music of Alina Simone. Upon learning of Alina for the first time, I realized I must cover this show and experience her music no matter how bad my jetlag (which is still in full effect as I’m writing this, by the way.) Alina is Ukrainian by birth, but grew up in the US, and has spent the last few years writing and recording her own music, performing with drummer John Lynch, and guitarist/misc instrumentalist Chris Barrey. Alina’s album Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware consists entirely of songs written by Yanka Dyageliva, a punk-folk-poet-singer-songwriter from Siberia, who mysteriously drowned at the young age of 24 in 1991 (no one knows if she committed suicide for sure, but she did struggle a good deal with depression so it is thought likely.) Yanka’s lyrics are unsurprisingly bleak, and are written with the poetic intensity of Anna Akhmatova coupled with the social descriptiveness of Nikolai Gogol.

Alina fell in love with Yanka’s music and was inspired to craft an album entirely of her music to pay a tribute to her incredible talent, which was so tragically cut short. Being the Russophile that I am, it’s probably not surprising that I was blown away by Alina’s renditions of Yanka’s plaintive and commanding ballads. Even though even I didn’t understand every word, and I’m sure most of the audience didn’t understand either (confirmed by a moment in her set when she asked everyone who spoke Russian to raise their hand, and I was the only one), being fluent in Russian is not necessary to absorb Alina’s interpretation of Yanka’s music. Alina veritably channeled Yanka’s core despair and raw anguish. Her face and body contorted around the dark and melodious phrases, while she expressively gesticulated with her hands, as if trying to physically grip the immense energy flowing from her as she sang. The thoughtful guitar and drum work of her bandmates cohesively supported her vocals and while I very much enjoyed their performance as a group, Alina can certainly carry the songs by herself (as demonstrated on Alina’s CD which is recorded solo.)

I appreciated that at the beginning of the show she introduced the music and life of Yanka, explaining to the audience why she chose to memorialize her music through a cover album. Alina also took a break to translate the song titled “My Sadness is Luminous” , so that the audience could get a better feel for exactly what kind of lyrics would inspire critics to dub Yanka’s music as “Russian Anguish.”“I repeat ten times and again / Nobody knows how fucking rotten I feel / And the television hangs from the ceiling / And how fucking rotten I feel, no one knows / I’m so fucking sick of all this / That I want to start all over again / This verse is so sad, so sad that again I repeat / How fucking rotten I feel.” Lest anyone assume these words to be overly dramatic, consider the context: Pre-perestroika Siberia was not exactly the easiest/happiest place to live, let alone perform counter-cultural music as a young woman in the midst of battling her own demons. Alina’s comments in the liner notes of her album sum up quite a lot: “I’ve never been able to get the hang of American optimism… I guess the tendency towards dark thoughts seems to run in Russian blood. Somehow whenever I feel lonely or lost or confused or hopeless or agitated for no reason I can find, the only thing that makes everything go away is Yanka’s music. Somehow, the simple act of sitting down with a guitar and breaking the silence of a room…with these songs, feels like a kind of religious experience. Like a confession or a prayer.”

Reading this confirmed the impression I had already gotten from her performance – that to sing Yanka’s words and play her melodies has been a deeply personal and transformative experience for Alina that extends through and beyond what she shares in common with Yanka: Slavic heritage, a deep appreciation of “punk-poetry” and Russian counter-culture, paired with a profoundly simple and haunting folk musicality.