A Musical Interlude - Punk Rock And Metal Music From Russia, Kazakhstan, And Georgia

I could write the usual sort of thing I write here, but I'll lay off of it for this post - I just like the music - and it blows away a lot of the US metal and punk rock I've been hearing

since the “woke” takeover destroyed those scenes in the US, starting about 2016, making it into lame and insipid “safe” junk, the inversion of punk rock - a mosh pit really isn’t a “safe space”…

vintage pic from punk rock show in Florida illustrating the above proposition…

OK. enough of that. Now to Russia - first, Bryansk, with Lyudi! (People!) - directly north of Ukraine:

Here’s their new EP:

Their originals are a lot better than their covers - turn on closed captioning and you can get English (or nearly any other language) subtitles. Click through to Youtube and you can get to their band page - they’ve got a new album out which you can get on Apple Music.

Here’s another group, Growther, from Biysk, which is in the wilds of Siberia, south of Barnaul - you can look it up on a map… the guitarist is heavily into American Mississippi Delta blues music - and then metal:

and then from a house show:

.Kazan has a folk-punk scene, here’s a band called Geranirad:

I think this next band is from Novosibirsk or someplace like that, reminds me a lot of Fetchin’ Bones, a band from North Carolina back in the 1980s:

This is Sonic Death, they started out in St Petersburg in about 2014 or so, then they bailed from Russia in 2022 - they didn’t like the Russian invasion of Ukraine - and weren’t afraid to say so - and they eventually bailed from Tbilisi, Georgia, when the government there was changed to a Putin-controlled puppet government:

Another show there:

One more:

Finally, from Astana in Kazakhstan where a fair number of bands from Russia have gone to because they wanted nothing to do with the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine:

and:

At least one of the bands above had their songs in a native language, not sure which one, but they weren’t singing in Russian…

Anyhow, a lot of good music here, if you like punk rock and metal.