After twelve years of silence, the band released new songs
The band members gave their fans a serious test of patience. Waves, A-Studio’s previous album, was released twelve years ago. Since then, archives have been published and a live album has been released, however, it was only now with the release of A’21 that the band could be assessed as authors of new songs.
This year A-Studio is celebrating its 35th anniversary, which, of course, is quite a lot for a pop group. Keyboardist and main composer Baigali Serkebaev and bass guitarist Vladimir Mikloshich (they are the only ones in the original band now) were able to remain active participants in the musical process thanks to numerous changes both in the group and in its style.
Something always happened in the life of the collective, and its founders built several times on the old foundation, though recognizable, but still different buildings. At the beginning of their career, they played jazz-rock, funk and served Kazakh folk music in a very unbanal way. Then they switched to cosmopolitan pop, and lately they have been floating quite confidently in dance music, not forgetting about the slow songs, which they have always been good at.
Trying to keep up with musical fashion performed by people with frighteningly great experience rarely looks sincere. When young people grab onto something super-relevant, their burning desire to express themselves goes hand in hand with a modest set of knowledge and skills. “A-Studio” know and are able to indecently a lot, but the adjective “seething” is hardly applicable to their desire to do what is needed now. Nevertheless, Mr. Serkebaev’s enthusiasm is simply admirable. A man in his sixties perfectly finds a common language with beat-makers, is immersed in modern technologies and clearly knows what he wants to get in the final.
The result is a very colorful album, in which the old and new schools have found relative peace and harmony. Nine tracks, one of which is a remix, fit both the perfect music for hot bachelorette parties (“Hair”, “That’s All She”), and a hurricane for dance floors (“Disco”), and a candidate for the Romantic Collection collections (“Se La Vie” ). In addition, there is a rather difficult exercise in rhythm (Avenue) and an insinuating whisper (“Breakfast without You”).
Probably, juggling with fashionable techniques in arrangements sometimes seems too intrusive, and some lines can be mistaken for attempts to get closer to the youth style of expressing thoughts, which most often makes me sad rather than laughs.
“They don’t understand when I’m crazy, I’ll dilute you for an evening with brandy, You’re not even a book, just a page, I read you, Bye bye acquaintance …” Katie Topuria sings, and if the feminist message here is somewhat invigorating, then it can be traced in rhymes some kind of disaster.
However, disassembling pop hits into lines is an occupation devoid of meaning. This is not a complex dish with self-sufficient ingredients, but rather a direct-acting cocktail. And it must be admitted that the A’21 fulfills its tasks. It hardly makes sense to compare it with “Soldier of Love” or other A-Studio classics, but through the years and distances the band’s tracks are still worth the studio time spent on them.