My favourite Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya are back with another slice of splintered luminosity influenced by the Saint Petersburg poet and artist Arthur Molev.
“Scythian Nest” dives straight into a clink-clanked needling mélange of avant folk — an addictive jiver, hot-coal leaping in falsetto warbles and noisy rubs. An absurdist cabaret jigger-jagging the jovial on wizened limbs as the instrumentation plays a nomadic hop-scotch with your ears.
Psychedelic changelings, fragmentary and flavoursome – a melodic converge that seeps elsewhere tranquillises reality’s hold – a dream-time that makes sense of that cover’s strange visual grip. Something that the boundary-blurring witchery of “Boulder Blues” exemplifies, easing away from the energetics of the opener, its simple repeated phrase finding a hypnotic hook.
But all this is nothing compared to the twenty-minute “Bubbling Pelt” that captures the Derevnya ensemble burning a taut and tensive heat back at 2020’s Tusk Festival. Its glistening glow cinematically shunting an oozy jazz-e-nated disposition that creeps your flesh (in a good way), a tightening periphery channelling; then un-caging its spirit animal. A primal pearl that the intoxicated ingot of “Gallant Spider” drifts away from and ends proceedings with a little earwormed mantra.
Staraya Derevnya can’t put a foot wrong in my option – well worth your hard-earned.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
