Sunday 31 July 2016

Staraya Derevnya - Kadita Sessions

There was really only one way to end my traditional summer blogging hiatus and that was with a review of an album that's done so much to get me through a couple of months of hotel rooms, train journeys and improbable work deadlines.

Kadita Sessions came out in April so it's frustrating that I've not been able to write anything about it before now.  It is, frankly, one of the most magical and bewitching albums I've heard for a long, long time.  From the guttural howl that is the starting point for opener of 'Hram' to the frantic close of 'Kadita', the listener is taken on a journey that's perhaps best described as one third aural Alice Through the Looking Class, one third experimental psych jamboree and one third impossible to describe.

One listen of the aforementioned album opener was enough to tell me that this was a collection that was likely to keep me occupied for a damn good portion of my life, working on the assumption that at some point in the hopefully far-off future I'll lose my faculties at roughly the same time as my bladder control.  An inability to appreciate something as wonderful as this is what makes me dread such a day (the loss of faculties, I mean; the loss of bladder control will be regrettable, but probably something I can learn to live with).

From there we're taken on seven extraordinary journeys, from the understated 'Chastity' to the majestically freakish 'Het', one of the album's shorter excursions but already a contender for my favourite track of 2016.

If that's not enough to whet your appetite you should know that you can download the whole thing here for NYOP, although there's also a CD version available and you can get your hands on a cassette via Weakie Discs.