This Week’s Interesting Music Releases

(August 5th, 2008)
Covering a Russian folk-punk legend virtually unknown in the west is an odd choice for a sophomore album (especially when you choose to sing in Russian), but Alina Simone brings Yanka Dyagileva’s music to life in Everyone Is Crying Out to Me Beware. In the most daring release of the year, Simone chooses not to mimic Dyagileva’s style but to put her own stamp on these songs with her powerful voice and artful arrangements that frame the lyrics perfectly. Last night after I read that one of my personal heroes, Aleksander Solzenhitsyn, had passed away, it was these songs (along with fragments of his prose) that echoed in my head until sleep took hold.