My Review: The Bolshoi Brothers - The Bolshoi Brothers

 

The Bolshoi Brothers - The Bolshoi Brothers

Once upon a time, and still is, there was a place in Wiltshire, in the south of England, not far from Bath, a place made famous by a post-punk, darkwave band (Bolshoi), whose name is Trowbridge and which for a while carried the quartet's delicious vicissitudes in its belly.

In 1990 the band disbanded and now the Old Scribe is about to take you on an ocean voyage, slow, to the heavens, with a harmonic blend that has ancient, delicate, fragrant overtones, where folk, psychedelia, the dampened skin of Alternative and Indie Rock form the basis for an inevitable rational circle. The eleven songs were written during  lockdown, at a distance: Florida calls, Seattle answers, in an only pretendedly separate path. The ideas, pregnant with moods and matured exposures to the thickening of thoughts at arm's length with philosophy, are set free by talent, by working on meaning, on the back of stories from the protected envelope of sounds that shed tenderness and curiosity. Many are the places over which the songs glide, many the references in which one might find a smile, a relief, but, above all, great is the perimeter of the verses, the arrangements, the singing, the energetic flow, the rays of sunshine that make the Bolshoi of yesteryear a pleasant but not essential memory. 

Trevor Tanner, as always guitarist and vocalist, draws, attracts the listener into his mental prairies, while Paul Clark (keyboards) is the great creator of this kaleidoscope, of this forest that tries to capture the light to feed on hope. And their new residences, American, have favoured an artistic birth in which, between the two poles, sensations, pains, impetuses and a thick sensory vegetation are compressed: an album like a momentum that knows no direction, to give meaning to true freedom.

It is rock that seems to be born from the burrs of Lou Reed, from the Australian psychedelia of the second half of Church's career, and even calls to mind the 1990s period of British bands that reproduced the thrill of the American shore that was specifically inspired by that of Boston. And that of the British band Eat. Moreover, there is the thrill given by the works of bands close to slowcore, especially then when a melancholic sense prevails in the refrains.

The old sombre petals are not absent, the broadsides of toxins, but the whole is more polished, with the ability to enter even country areas, almost like a challenge, easily won, as the two have never missed the appointment with irony (as in the song Cowboy Chords). However, throughout this artistic exercise, the guitars are always far from swallowing the whole: they are generous, attentive and scrupulous, willing to translate the passage of their lives. 

It takes courage to write a flutter of wings, when previously they were describing insecure footsteps in the dark night on the streets of London.

The testimony of adulthood, of a path that seeks development, cannot be tied to nostalgia.

There are elements of contact with a glorious and dangerous idea: to orchestrate existence with songs like a Matryoshka doll with the intention of contact, as if the songs were pages inside a library eager to fit into the palms of our hands.

When Beautiful Creature arrives, it becomes clear how the American rock roots are capable of revealing the post-punk side of yesteryear, but clothed in a luminous film close to the enchantment of a miracle, which is perfectly successful. The presence of the nineties is strong in at least half of the tracks, however not as a limitation, but as a muscular gymnasium of solos capable of bringing the sound back to its rightful place. And then the Blue Aeroplanes often peep in, as does the feel of a pop cabaret in search of shy applause, and Trevor's acting takes the stage of madness, with quotations, references that are truly remarkable. One dances with awareness, smiles and finds generous tears in the splendid and conclusive This Town, a true intuitive jewel, capable of surprising and dragging into the intimate locality of reasoning every fear...   

Fulcrum, barycentre and arrow free to separate from the dungeon is the mammoth Platitudes of Scorn, a biological treatise, a vocabulary of beauty that, starting from English psychedelia, lands in the claustrophobic American ballad, to become the piece on which to connect the sunny and the sombre sides of the two musical craftsmen, here in total harmony, to give not only the song but the entire album an inescapable sense of epicness.

They have grasped the sense of the passing of time and let it turn its back on them, without bitterness, without unnecessary eruptions of anger. A resounding discipline, made possible by their own production, makes the whole thing feel like one long breath from eleven feathers, each one heartening the others.

Small sparks from their past can be found in the penultimate composition, Built in Obsolescence, a crossroads, a pill that from the mind of a past tries to reach reality. Amniotic, neurotic, electric, it is definitely epidermic in that it knows how to hold an enormous amount of time by compressing it into a minute-length that, although short, is very representative of the period that was glorious for them.  One cannot do without Suburbs, that second sonic enchantment that sends shivers down one's spine, for the writing that burns away hostilities and restores meaning to provincial living, to stories that risk remaining unheard.

One can do without a passport but not without identity: here, the aforementioned This Town reveals remixed old loves (The Velvet Underground), which in a moment of freshness manage to fool the movement of the hands of the clock, only to move on to the Beatles and England, for a homecoming.

Which is perfectly the dominant factor of this record: starting from the limit (the lockdown), to find a new residence: the one within oneself, for a resoundingly harmonious and intense result...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

21st March 2025

https://thebolshoibrothers.bandcamp.com/album/the-bolshoi-brothers