YшY

As a teenager, I flanked punk from two directions...TWISTED SISTER led me directly to DEAD KENNEDYS via the PMRC hearings, while commercial new wave overlapped broadly with punk and industrial sounds because in '80s Small Town, America there just weren't that many alternatives if you were...you know, alternative. We ate it all up, and if we didn't like it then we still listened and tried to understand it, trying to glean whatever we could from whatever new sounds we could find. People listened to HUMAN LEAGUE and SUICIDAL, and we used Reign In Blood to get to Bonded By Blood even if we listened to ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN after school. This 2015 Russian release makes me think of that. YшY are cold, dark, mechanical new wave and/or synth pop, more in line with SPARKS than DEPECHE MODE with a robotic presence that reminds me of primitive European disco as much as anything I would have called new wave. But you listen, you try to understand, you glean what you can....and somewhere around the drum break in "Бангкок" you get hooked. Sometimes the guitar work reminds me of the first INTERPOL record (a record that I heartily and unashamedly endorse), but mostly this is completely it's own thing.  And so we keep digging....

YшY