Russian Rockers Mumiy Troll Hit Chop Suey — Seattlest (Seattle)
Russian Rockers Mumiy Troll Hit Chop Suey
Friday night was our first visit to Chop Suey since the shooting a month or so ago, and the security situation was basically a nightmare. A line of will-call ticket holders wrapped east up the block to the hot-dog vendor`s cart. It took almost twenty minutes to get the roped off entry, where a bouncer was already bouncing an enraged young man, furious that he was unable to get into the sold-out show, while his girlfriend, wearing what was little more than an homage to a miniskirt, stared on mortified as he unleashed a tirade only partly in English.
Such is the pull of Mumiy Troll, purportedly one of Russia`s biggest bands, on their first North American tour. But don`t get us wrong--aside from a bitter emigre pissed that he couldn`t get in to get a taste of home, the audience was a happy, cheery, chatty crowd that was totally stoked to get to see the band that represented Russia in the 2001 Eurovision Contest. (They came in twelfth.)
This band`s draw in America is apparently near non-existent, at least thus far; aside from the odd boyfriend or girlfriend of someone else, English was decidedly the second language to a mix of Russian and assorted other Slavic.
Going in, we knew virtually nothing about the band, other than they were from Vladivostok on the Siberian Pacific coast, north of the Korean Peninsula, which is about as middle-of-nowhere as you can get on Earth. We hurriedly checked the band`s MySpace a couple days before the show to make sure we weren`t going into some right-wing xenophobic hate-metal band, so little did we know.
But no, as it turned out, Mumiy Troll is essentially catchy dance-rock, Duran Duran beats with an edge borrowed from AC/DC and later punk sources like Green Day. The band calls it «poparocks,» a sort of reverse mix of rock and pop, where instead of synthing up rock, you rock up synth.
As lead-singer Ilia Lagutenko explained it to the Salt Lake Tribune (unpublished in the final cut, but on the band`s website), «Lots of Russian rock music in the 80s had been based on hard rock and prog rock ideas. We were not that great musicians, and I was big fan of New Wave and Neo Romantics, bands like Blondie, Depeche Mode. However, we did not have access to proper synthesizers and drum machines, so we were creating our own kind of sound using live instruments. Something like Heavy New Wave. We did not have enough admirers for that. People told us we were not Rock enough and too pop.»
The above description risks making the band sound out-dated, though, which couldn`t be further from the truth. Though formed originally in `83 when the members were teenagers, the band was really a product of the 1990s. A long break occurred in the mid- to late-80s when Lagushenko was drafted into the Soviet military, narrowly avoiding deployment to the ill-fated war in Afghanistan.
Today the band remain superstars in Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union, more used to playing stadiums than clubs, which perhaps explains some of the fans` intense excitement--seeing Mumiy Troll in a club as tiny as Chop Suey is sort of like seeing Pearl Jam or the Stones there.
Bouncing around in a vaguely military jacket, with a long shock of hair and persistently mugging to the audience, Lagutenko`s voice is a dead-ringer for Bauhaus-frontman Peter Murphy. We honestly don`t know their catalog well enough to name any songs besides their rather awesome cover of «California Dreaming.» The band decided almost by accident to bring themselves to the U.S. when they set out to record their latest album. With options available around the world, they decided on a whim to do it in L.A. And following that they decided to put in the effort to try to win over American audiences. Launching their first U.S. tour a couple weeks ago in D.C., right after the inauguration, the band closed it up in Portland on Saturday night at Berbatti`s Pan.
Wednesday night, they rock the sold-out Siemen`s Arena in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Sent by Elis