Stigmata – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

CATCH UP: Stigmata Eight Years On.

Saint Petersburg’s Veteran rockers tour Central Asia with their brand of Russified Metalcore.

I am perched in the darkness in my coat on the metal stairs which lead to an upper level. I sip now and again from a Budweiser which had taken me an age to get. Ahead of me, obscured in part by a throng, four men bathed in white light ooze a racket. I am trying to rewind to eight years ago when I first caught sight of this ensemble….

Established icons.

STIGMATA constitute a heavy rock outfit most often pigeonholed as `Metalcore` (stripped down heavy metal with a punk approach) or sometimes `Emocore` (confessional lyrics conveyed in a highly charged manner). As a part of the Russian subcultural landscape, this foursome has beavered away on the scene since they first picked up their guitars and mikes in Saint Petersburg in 2003.

Along with the likes of Jane Air and Distemper they were set in motion by Kap-Kan records, the self-styled `alternative to the mainstream` rock label who but a year after their formation released STIGMATA’S Conveyor of Dreams album. Since then, they can boast five more studio albums and a many single, their latest being `Polusa` (Poles) from this year.

Cover for the new single: `Poles.`
[Zuk.com]

During that time there have been many comings and goings of personnel, but the ones that I beheld were the were the same as the lot at the Red Club in Moscow eight years ago which included two founder members. The new boy is the clash-and-bang merchant Gregor Karpov who has been with the band for but a year.

They are beginning a tireless schedule of a gig each evening. Having come from Astana (the capital of Kazakhstan) on the 6^th October they will play in Tashkent in Uzbekistan after Almaty and then will turn their attention to a series of towns in their home country right until mid-December!

Here they are guests of Zhest Club, a somewhat hole-in-corner alternative rock venue. It has no cloakroom and it is all but impossible to buy a drink after 8pm owing to its packed nature.

Modest entrance.

On coming in from the warm October to hand in my ticket, I was surprised to discover that a band were already in full swing. The warm up was a chunky bespectacled chap and a willowy long-haired companion who churned out a very generic type of nu-metal. The crowd – a few hundred mostly ethnic Russians in baggy hoodies – responded with polite whoops and claps but here we had a reminder that in order to stand out something more is needed than musical competence and enthusiasm.

As nine struck the hour the band we had come to see obliged by getting onto the stage. They did so without the usual niceties of dry ice and light displays. Only the television screens on either side of the stage with their flickering images of the band’s name gave any sense of pomp and circumstance. In fact, going on appearances, STIGMATA could have been another support act. Compared to the Red Club this environment humbled them a little, yet perhaps provided them with a bit of authentic grit. They even seemed a tad unprepared, having to take time out to tune their instruments.

Their name promises Gothic theatricality, after all, but they are nothing much to look at. The lead vocalist Artyom Lotskikh could be the identikit Russian bloke: paunchy, bearded and pale-skinned. The two guitarists, Denis Kichenko and Taras Umansky, in caps and matching grey knee length shorts succeed in spicing up the visual aspect by favouring us with Saint Vitus dances as they play along.

Lotskikh is that rarest of animals: a lead singer who dislikes being the centre of attention to the point where he makes his way to the back of the stage after each song to recover himself. It is Umansky who takes on the task of laying on the much-needed interactive content with merry banter between songs and lobbing water bottles at the eager moshers at the front.

Another idiosyncrasy is their practice of playing at low volume recordings of their better-known songs just a second before going on to play the live one. As they grind their way through `Krilya` and `Lyod` and `Ostan Nadeshov` a svelte female photographer distracts us by crouching in the wings trying to get shots of with a long lens camera.

Quiet pioneers?

As much as STIGMATA get bracketed alongside their Metalcore counterparts in the States such as Killswitch Engage and Trivium, Lotskikh’s songwriting seems distinct in its Russianess, with a strain of folk about it. It could almost be as if they were forging, without hue-and-cry, their own subgenre of `Slavic power ballads` or something of the sort.

The set, at an hour and a half, was shorter than most. This gave me time to mull things over. Taken as a whole this had been a lackluster set by a nevertheless likeable group. Also, you can say this of their sound: it stays with you. The ringing guitars and soaring voice remained my companion during the long walk home.

Main image: UK: In Contact With.

OURS SINCERELY: LUMEN LIVE AT THE GLAV CLUB IN MOSCOW, 26TH MARCH.

Live rock is back – and with it LUMEN, an unpretentious quartet revisiting the songs that made them Russia’s favourite alt-rock exponents.

Lumen: (i) A unit for measuring the amount of light an object radiates.

Lumen: (ii) A prominent Russian alt-rock band who have been on the scene for 23 years..

About this time last year, with the Big Stop looming,I decided to forego the few live gigs still on offer then. Little did I realise at that time that it would be a whole year later before I would be gracing darkened halls full of people younger than myself and observing amplified performances.

Can I even remember how to do it?

Back in harness.

Getting back to the fray bought back all the tatty rawness of gig going that
I so love to hate.

The huddled gangs getting tanked up in the queue as you wait to enter…the general getting jostled about…the overpriced headache inducing Budweiser in plastic glasses…the pre-gig excited whoops as a roadie comes on stage to fiddle with a detail of the set…the trying not to spill your beer as you attempt to get some passable shots of the band with your unfit for purpose camera…all of that.

Alt-rock success story.

LUMEN – a four piece string and drum outfit -constitute a product of Ufa in Bakshortostan (in fact, they have written at least one song in the Bashkiri language). It tells you a lot that the band can boast an exact birthday: 12th February 1998, the fateful day when they became LUMEN and embarked on writng their own material.

LUMEN eschew genre labels and their music does elude them to some extent. They do not represent any kind of Metal, Nu or otherwise and seem too well-mannered and reflective to qualify as` punks`.` Alt-rock` seems the safest fit for what they do. Their nearest peers might be STIGMATA, except minus the grandiloquent Gothic trappings of that act, or PILOT yet lacking the evergetic inventiveness of those St Petersburgians.

They have gifted Russia and Eastern Europe with some nine recordings. Their name is fated, however, to be bound up with a piece entitled Sid and Nancy – a ballad extolling bonding through shared alienation which name-checks the punk celebrities in doing so. This summoned up a cult status amongst the nadstats of 2003 on receiving radio exposure.

LUMEN followed this hit with a reputation-cementing 18 track album called (in Russian) No Preservatives. Here was a band in the KINO tradition, taking a no-frills approach and telling it like it is.(Indeed, anti-government and ant-war anthems form a part of their repertoire. So far though, they seemed to have escaped the kind of attention from the higher-ups that have dogged the carees of LOUNA and IC3PEAK).

It is this very album that the concerts at Glav Club on 24th and 25th of March were staged in honour of. For two nights running – Friday and Saturday LUMEN were to revisit those compositions again as an 18 year anniversary.

Real people.

The two thousand or so punters who show up on this early spring evening – plus three degrees already! -appear an unspectacular lot, all grey and black khaki and t-shirts and anything between twenty and thirty years of age.

Among them are some true fans: I espy people at the front holding up some illuminated signs of the band’s birthday at the front of the pit.

Otherwise, I sense that we are all here to check out each other. This is always the case with such rock events but, this year, the hunger is even greater.(Indeed, at the end of the show many show a marked reluctance to leave and even crash out on the floor in small groups).

It’s about the music.

LUMEN saunter onto the stage without any theatrical preamble, soI am at the bar when it happens, trying to get the barman’s attention. Donned in tight jeans and their own promotional t-shirts, they could be members of their own audience.

The lynx-lean lead vocalist Rustem Bulatov.for all his lack of preservatives, does not look his forty-years of age although his chunkier colleagues do just a tad more.

I am more familiar with the band’s more recent anthemic material but what they play tonight seems to be a kind of power-pop which most in the audience know well enough to to sing along to. Sid and Nancy, however, is taken out for a walk.

With his earnest image,I do not expect Bulatov to be so garrulous. In between pieces he addresses us all as though he knows us, but with a casual and respectful air. What has most impact on me though, is Igor Mamaev’s lead guitar. He delivers quasi-classical sequences of soaring melody which have me closing my eyes in zoned out relish.

It is all about the music. The band have no recourse to video projections, or such special effects, but just use alternating red and blue lights for the most part. There are only a few balloons, The rhythm king – Denis Shakhanov – does not lob his sticks into the crowd and nor are there multiple encores or a selfie taken with the crowd.

A proper picure of the band – taken by a proper photographer. [metalking.org]

Isolation begone.

When the two hour set comes to a close and the masses chant `mol-od-yets` (`well done`) Bulatov, in a gesture of honest humility bows with his palms pressed together.

It all feels like a note in the margins of the post-pandemic situation. Yes, we are ordered to mask up on the way in to the venue. Yes, the bartenders insist on us wearing masks when we order (as is right and fair). Otherwise the masks are off and the band do not even reference the pandemic. It is like 2019 again – and a worthy beginning to a new season of live music in Moscow.

Soul versus market.

LUMEN offer a kind of heartfelt desire to share. They offer `sincerity`. This commodity may have been a bit out of vogue in the West for some time but many roubles could be put on `sincerity` making a rapid come back.

The Welsh rock combo THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS are what LUMEN remind me of a little. Here we have decent young men cocking a snook at the acknowledged grim realities of contemporary life for all too many of us.

But the burning question this raises is as old as the hills. Can LUMEN’s `sincerity` hold up when they are, for example, flogging LUMEN themed money belts, or producing arty-crafty videos to showcase their latest slow moving ballads – and staging nostalgic retrospectives like this one? They are, after all a well-established act who have reached, as they say, `the pinnacle of their career`.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Missives from the Mosh-pit, 2015.

For obvious reasons, there is not a whole lot going on in live music in Russia right now. So, from the more carefree time of five years ago, here are two reviews of prominent Russian alt rock exponents – STIGMATA and TRAKTOR BOWLING – who played live at the Red Club in central Moscow in the winter of 2015. (I only wrote these for a very low circulation school newsletter – so I am not regurgitating anything too much by posting them here)

STIGMATA, AT RED, 21^ST NOVEMBER.

Burly, and bored, the security men manning the gates of Red nightclub seemed reluctant the let the crowd in. We had been hanging about in the dank November evening for too long, pacing around the arty boutiques and fancy restaurants, and it was past seven already. Most of the fans were buying their tickets –for the Stigmata Legion Tour – on the night. I had claimed mine a month or so earlier, and had needed to write the band’s name in both English and Russian before the sellers in the kiosk understood what I was asking for. (This is clearly a cult band therefore). Then, when the gatekeepers gave us the all-clear, they squinted at my ticket for some time as though they were worried that it might be for Elton John or something.

Young following.

Maybe they had a point: the three hundred or so Stigmata devotees must have still been in their cots when the band was launched at the turn of the century. Fresh-faced and flushed with expectation as they were, I caught myself hoping that the show would be good for them, as for some it may have been their first rock gig.

In the still chilly darkness of the club, the fans, anonymous in their indifferent denims and checked shirts, just kept on coming. We all stood about for a good hour gazing at the stylised `S` logo on the stage. Next to me a lanky guy in a Papa Roach t-shirt sucked on some kind of scented E-cigarette while a circle of baseball capped boys, their leader in a `666` sweatshirt, passed the time in the manner of ice-hockey team supporters by calling out the band’s name.

When the backstage screen lit up with Stigmata in black and white and they materialised, the walls and floor vibrated and the crowd began to jab the air with their fingers to the beat of the grinding noise.

Doomsayers from St Petersburg.

A five piece string and drum combo, Stigmata emerged from the rival town of St Petersburg. This fact, along with their occult laden moniker, would suggest a dark-wave Gothic type of music. Their actual sound though is a fast-paced and impassioned one: the sort that encourages a section of the audience to coalesce into a rugby-type scrum as the night progresses. You have to take a look at their translated lyrics to see the darker picture behind it all. What follows is lifted at random from some verses in – brace yourself- Psalms of Conscious Martyrdom (2010):

`Shield your skin for it shall peel/see the hungry jackals come and tear you limb by limb/ burn the day, darkened light`

(Er, no thanks! I’ve got a dentists appointment at five!)

Efficient.

Artyom Lotskih, the goatee bearded and paunchy lead singer, has one leg in a caste but gets on with the job without tiring. He belts out a bass growl and a rasp – signature clichés of the metal core genre which critics bracket the band in. Sometimes he sings melodies, and when he does he has a rather pleasant quavering voice. The person however, who introduces the songs and addresses the crowd is the rhythm guitarist, Taras Umansky.

Vladimir Zinovyev’s energetic drumming holds the whole performance together and the band, knowing this, have set him up on a raised platform. Then the guitarists provide some needed spectacle by goofing about: the bassist Denis Kichenko boasts a fret board with lights along it and the lead guitarist, who calls himself Duke, headbangs over a triangular guitar with his well-kept shoulder-length locks splayed about him. You get the impression that he rather wishes he were a member of the band Europe or something. Both twirl about like dervishes in the red and blue spotlights with their cordless instruments.

The songs came and went without much to distinguish them. Some were given a pensive aspect, such as the well-known Sentyabr by being introduced by a recorded piano motif. Then half way through their two hour set they incorporated some techno style interludes to their pieces which worked quite well.

This was a workman-like set from Stigmata. They left, without observing the convention of having introduced the band members, but after having their picture taken in front of the crowd – the same crowd who earlier had caught the bottles of half drunk water they tossed to them as though it were holy.

As we took our leave, I was pleased to see a lady, perhaps in her sixties, threading her way through the clusters of teens. `Whoa! ` I thought. `That’s cool! Someone here older than me! `

That was before I realised that she was most likely someone’s grandmother, here to pick one of the fans up and drive them home.

Tracktor Bowling – at Red, October 3^rd.

The bells of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour chimed just as I darted out of Kropotkinskaya metro exit into a crisp early October evening.

I was headed to altogether different type of sonic distraction: no sooner had I clapped eyes on the poster in the metro – advertising a visit by Tracktor Bowling to showcase their new Byezkonechnost album -than I had snapped up a ticket.

Having appeared on a compilation CD of numetal legends from Russia, which also boasted the likes of Stigmata and Amatory, they were already known to me. Besides, I tell myself, seeing Russian rock acts keeps me in touch with the world some of my students inhabit – and, since the genre has remained in stasis since the nineties, does so without making me feel too much like an ancient interloper.

Enduring.

Tracktor Bowling themselves are hardly a baby band: by this time next year they will have been rocking for two decades – a fact alluded to in the title of their new album (which means, something like, `never ending`). Wikipedia has even dubbed the group `the leaders of Moscow alternative rock`. Indeed, for a comparison you would need to look at the British Skunk Anansie or the German band Guano Apes, although they lack the balls of the first band and the originality of the latter.

What pushed them ahead, however, was the addition of Louise Gevorkyan as the lead singer in the nearly noughties. This thirty two year old Kaplan born Armenian, whose photogenic aquiline looks are one of the band’s unique selling points, studied music and teaches singing herself. A busy woman, she divides her time between Traktoring and fronting another outfit called Louna who, with their punkish socially conscious stance, have been making waves in America.

The gathering.

A mixed sex stream of black t-shirt and hooded topped twenty-somethings began to fill up the Red club at Yakmanskaya Nab on the riverside. Anonymous thrash rock played in the background and people’s trainers glowed in the ultraviolet light and I was relieved to see that, among them, there were also some older, nondescript types who had turned up to see what all the fuss was about.

There was a stampede to the front as the lights dimmed and the band’s logo flashed up on the screen behind it. Then, as the fans chanted `Track-tor track-tor` a siren sounded and we were then treated to a slick series of slides showing the band through the ages: a sort of early anniversary celebration. Then: there they were.

Rock chick.

Lousine now sports-bottle blonde hair and cuts a chunky figure in her cut off black jeans and Rage Against The Machine T-shirt. The men –Mult, Vil and Prof, all tattoos and short hair, looked like the seasoned musicians they are, but did not muster the same kind of attention as the singer.

For all their `alternative` trappings what Tracktor Bowling trade in is Power Metal: hearty ballads which sometimes sit alongside more shouted numbers. They only sing in Russian and among the few songs I recognised was `Cherta` (`The Edge`) and another one which translates as `Walking on Glass`. The crowd, though, not only knew the songs but where belting out their own duets to them. Loiusine, with the engaging manner of a tomboy skater, knows her audience well. Her pogoing and the later slam dunking enlivened a self-punishing two and a half hour set. After the encore they did not wait to commune with their followers but disappeared as – and this custom is unique to Russian rock gigs – some of them called out `Spa-si-ba! Spa-s-ba! `. Soon the besuited security men set about shepherding us from the building. I walked out of the club infected with the energy of it all, and with the sense that I had witnessed something of a phenomenon.