From Russia, with song Alina Simone’s new CD is a tribute to ‘Yanka,’ an icon in her homeland

By David Menconi, Staff Writer

The first tipoff that Alina Simone’s new album isn’t your typical rock record comes 10 seconds into the first track. The jagged squall of guitars on “Half My Kingdom” seems normal enough for indie rock — until a cinematic trumpet riff wafts in. And then another 10 seconds go by, and Simone begins to sing. In Russian.In fact, there’s not a word of English on Simone’s “Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware.” Stark and dramatic, it’s one of the most unusual albums in recent memory.

Simone is a part-time Triangle resident whose work has drawn frequent comparisons to Cat Power, P.J. Harvey and other women who rock emotionally. But she’s never done anything as ambitious as “Beware,” which she’ll unveil Tuesday at a show in Chapel Hill.

“Beware” (54/40 or Fight Records) is a tribute album to “Yanka,” the late Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva. A Soviet-era punk-rock legend who died in 1991, Yanka is virtually unknown to mainstream audiences outside Russia. Yet the music Yanka left behind was powerful enough to earn her a worldwide cult following.

“To me, Yanka’s life story is very bound up in her music,” Simone says. “It’s incredibly striking, and also completely unique in Soviet-era rock music. She was the only woman really doing what people here would consider indie rock, setting an example I find compelling.”

If Yanka’s life and music are inextricably linked, you could say the same about the Russian-born Simone’s life and this project. There was a time when Simone could not have imagined making a record like this one, which took her back to roots that she used to resist.

“When I was growing up, we respected Russian cultural heritage,” she says. “But my parents were political refugees. So that was taboo.”

Cold War childhood

Simone was born in the Ukraine in 1975, to dire circumstances because her parents were on the outs with the ruling Soviet regime. Her family immigrated to America when she was an infant.

Eventually, they settled in Massachusetts. Simone’s father, Alexander Vilenkin, is a theoretical physicist at Tufts University and an acclaimed author (most notably 2006’s “Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes”).

While Simone was growing up, her family still spoke Russian around the house. But she had mixed feelings about her heritage.

“I grew up during the Reagan ’80s, and I would liken being Russian in this country then to being Muslim after 9/11,” Simone says. “Every night, the news basically said the Soviets wanted to nuke us.

“People would come up to me and say nasty things if they heard me speaking Russian to my grandmother, who spoke no English. Halloween one year, somebody wrote ‘Commies Go Home’ on our driveway with shaving cream.”

Not surprisingly, Simone did her best to assimilate. She went by the Americanized first name Allie in high school and legally changed her last name to her mother’s maiden name, Simone, when she married Joshua Knobe in 1999.

By her own admission, Simone showed little interest in her Russian heritage through her college years. She earned degrees in English and photography at Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. By her mid-20s, Simone was living in Austin, Texas, and doing volunteer work.

She also took her first steps into music then, mostly playing on street corners in Austin’s busy Sixth Street nightclub district. But something was missing.

“It just struck me one day, ‘I need to go back to Russia, learn Russian and find my family,’ ” she recalls.

She found a job in international development, which took her to Russia in 2001. In retrospect, Simone is surprised at her own nerve. Her Russian, which she had neglected for years, was shaky at best. Her first posting was in deepest Siberia.

And, in a supreme irony, her parents — who had pushed her to learn Russian while growing up — resisted her attempts to go back.

“Oh, my parents totally freaked about it,” Simone says, laughing at the memory. “They were so not down with it. My parents almost died when I told them.”

Simone’s father can laugh about it now, too, although he was deeply concerned about his only child going back to the country he had fled.

“There was a lot of crime, and I think we had some reasons to be worried,” Vilenkin says. “She was going to some pretty dreary places. Some I’d been to in my youth, hitchhiking in Siberia. On my travels, I saw trains with prisoners of the Gulag. I didn’t know what that was, so it was pretty scary.”

Yanka’s influence

By the time she went to Russia for the first time, Simone was already familiar with Yanka’s music from a tape someone had given her. Yanka’s career as a musician lasted just four years, from 1987 until her mysterious death by drowning in 1991. She was 24, and her death was ruled a suicide.

Despite Yanka’s obscurity outside of Russia, her place in history is significant. Yuri Saprykin, editor of the Russian culture magazine Afisha (afisha.ru), calls her the most important figure in Russian rock.

“She’s like the Velvet Underground,” Saprykin says. “Few people listened to her when she was alive, but almost every one of them fell under her influence. All Russian female rock singers after Yanka continue her tradition, consciously or not.”

Yanka left behind 29 songs (the same number as American bluesman Robert Johnson, interestingly enough). Steeped in feelings of conflict and oppression, those songs struck a chord with Simone — who was still finding her way as a musician and writing raw, emotive songs of her own.

“Not to flatter myself, but Yanka’s vibe was very similar to mine,” Simone says. “Very raw, emotional, passionate vocals and simple music with great melodies. I felt like I understood the impact she was trying to make, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. When it came to the question of who or what I might cover, she was the obvious choice.”

Fortuitously, Simone’s work trips to Russia frequently took her to Yanka’s old hometown, Novosibirsk. Learning about Yanka became intertwined with Simone learning about her own family. She tracked down her own relatives, as well as Yanka fans and associates.

She made a pilgrimage to the house where Yanka was born. And on her birthday last year, Simone and a Russian Orthodox priest did a Pannychis ceremony (a night vigil for the dead) over Yanka’s grave.

After finishing her “Placelessness” album in 2006, Simone decided she wanted to do a Yanka tribute. The first task was to figure out which songs to cover. She settled on nine songs (10 for the vinyl version), from the edgy dread of “Beware” to the subdued chiming of “Sold.”

You might not understand the Russian lyrics, but the sense of angst and struggle comes through.

“Her music is really punk and hard to cover, very raw and stripped down,” Simone says. “A lot of the strumming patterns are similar. So the songs I chose were mostly based on diversity.

“Some are plucked, some very fast, some jazzy. They were the songs I felt I could do the most with. There were some I couldn’t do better than she did, and I didn’t want to do any worse. I wanted to pick the songs I could do my own way, rather than lame versions of the same thing.”

The challenge of poetry

Simone recorded most of “Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware” in two days in May 2007, financed by a $1,500 grant from the Durham Arts Council. Overdubs, mixing, artwork, liner notes, translations and other logistical details took a year to pull together.

But on the other side of the process, Simone is a lot more confident — even if she admits she still has a lot to learn.

“By the time I recorded this, my Russian was much better,” she says. “But it was still extremely challenging. This Russian is like lyrical poetry, words I’d never heard — 70 percent, say. It’s really advanced, like Wordsworth. Even Russians don’t really understand what they mean. They’ll ask me to explain, and I can’t.”

So far, reaction has been good. “Beware” picked up a solid review and a 7.4 rating out of 10 (higher than Simone earned for “Placelessness”) on pitchforkmedia.com. And the critics who know Yanka’s music best have also given their approval.

“It’s really hard to sing Yanka’s songs after Yanka,” Saprykin says. “Her own versions are really self-fulfilling, you cannot add or change something without spoiling it. Alina’s work is unique — she managed to sing in her own manner, not killing the spirit of the songs.”

Since “Beware” has taken so long to come out, Simone is already pretty far along on her next album (tentatively titled “Make Your Own Danger”). By the time that comes out next year, it’s hard to say where she’ll be living.

The past few years, Simone has split her time between New York and Carrboro, in part because her husband teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill (he’ll also open her show here with a workshop on experimental philosophy). Simone will spend much of the rest of this year touring, and another trip to Siberia is set for November.

Back to folk

In Siberia, Simone says, she hopes to do some hunting for old folk tunes. Eventually, maybe she can take a band to Russia for a concert tour, beyond the three shows she played there last year.

The experience of singing Yanka’s songs in Russian in her native country was, she acknowledges, a risky thing to do. But no riskier than this entire undertaking.

“Yanka’s such an icon there, like their Kurt Cobain or Patti Smith, and I was afraid to sing Russian with an American accent,” Simone says. “A lot of people there cherish Yanka and think her music is like a shrine, not to be touched.

“But the critics were kind. The coolest thing about this has been being in contact with other passionate fans. It’s a small circle, but you feel automatic kinship.”