As leader of the band Akvarium*, Boris Grebenshikov was one of the primary figures of Soviet era underground rock, and a major definer of the no-tone-shift-forbidden standard that many Ruskii rockers followed in their music. Lighthearted romps, music hall crooning, romantic ballads, minor key growls, white boy reggae, and ska--all fell under the umbrella of Akvarium's "unofficial artist" days, when all performing and recording had to be done on the sly. The goal wasn't always political; many Grebenshikov lyrics, in true Dylan style, refuse to be broken down into base elements, even in the original Russian. The effect was to take the rock music filtering in from the West and merge it with the broader tradition of Russian literature, and the end result was a band that could not be ignored. ("In the fall of '86," Boris wrote later, "we moved from stadium to stadium with such violent ovations, it was as if we personally brought down Soviet power.")

Meanwhile, the word was getting around. A 1986 compilation LP of various Soviet rock bands was assembled in the US from smuggled tapes, and Akvarium was declared the highlight of the package. Boris was transformed into a "perestroika poster boy," and as an artist with a good command of the English language, Grebenshikov was signed to a major label contract with Columbia in 1989. That's roughly the point where everything fell apart.

The album that emerged, Radio Silence, was something of a mess. Boris and his producer were given roughly five weeks from the songwriting stage to the finish, and the forced hurry--coupled with gobs and gobs of unsympathetic late 80s synth--had a large hand in sinking the finished product.

Disillusioned with the whole Western hit making process, Boris ended up back in Russia as a solo act, biding his time with film soundtracks and "archival" rerecordings of old material. In the meantime, the East-West economic miracles that were supposed to be coming with the fall of Communism and the rise of the free market had yet to surface.  From the disarray that surrounded him and his country came 1992’s The Russian Album, one of the finest achievements of a broad-ranging career.

The Album:

I feel the need to qualify this review right off the bat: if you're looking for a hard-rocking experience, this probably isn't the album to start your BG collection.  Since Boris and Company have recorded in a number of different genres, you’re bound to find something that strikes your fancy if you do your homework.

The album opens with a track called "Orchestrating," a brief, odd instrumental that evokes the sound of the Middle Ages, followed by the pseudo-Doobie Brothers churn of an acoustic guitar to take us into "Nikita Ryazanskii," a song about a man who built a city with his bare hands and left it to find God.

The set pivots around two epic-length songs wrapped in an Eastern folk setting that, with a "guitar-mandolin-no-percussion" setting and lyrics sung with a slowly building intensity, are as muted as a frozen landscape and as broad in their sweep. The first, "Volki I Vorony" (Wolves and Ravens), is a dark parable of empty churches ("I would have lit a candle, but all the candles were gone. / I would have burned spirit in my hand but where could I get some?"), where the hunted are compelled to lie down with the predators, maybe sitting for dinner, maybe sitting to be dinner, in hope that one of them will reach the "pure star" always frustratingly out of reach.

The second, "Koni Bespedrela" (Stampeding Horses), takes us into the homestretch, as Boris leads us through a nightmare version of the free market œstampeding horses, loading up everything of value and darting for the hills.  In this version, nobody who tries to escape gets very far.  All of this, in typical BG style, is couched in a thick fog of metaphor that we can only assume Boris trusts the right people to decipher.

After this, we are let off the hook somewhat with the light, beautiful "Elizaveta," ("Do what you want, but don't speak / words are death.") and, jarringly, finish with "Burlak" (The Volga Boatsman), the only full-tilt rocker of the whole set.

The end result is an album of deep sadness without self-pity, quiet anger with a hint of hope thrown around the edges, and one of my top picks of the past decade. If a message can be drawn from any of this, I think it would be summed up in the line from the old cartoon: What are we going to do now? We're going to do the best we can.

 So What Now?

The best English-language resource for Akvarium/Grebenshikov related music (and an invaluable resource for writing this review) is the Bodhisattvas of Babylon, at dharmafish.org, which features nicely-written album-by-album analysis and links to the music importers who are your best bet at finding any of this material at a reasonable price. With no official American release, you'll need websites like this for the
translated lyrics alone

 (*Footnote: Yes, the band’s name is Russian for "aquarium," but since one-hit wonder Aqua has managed to ruin that word for pop music (and Google keyword searches), the English-speaking Ruskii rock fans usually differentiate by using the phonetic Russian word.)