Buerak
August 9, 2020 at 1:35 am,
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Buerak is a romantic post-punk band from Siberia with absurdly ironic lyrics playing simple and honest music that would have sounded appropriate both at a disco in Manchester in the 80's, and at a semi-underground concert in some Leningrad community center in the early 90's.
The lyrics are ironic, mundane, and absurd. According to the artists, the similarity with the songs of the 80's is not accidental, because “all Russian music repeats itself”, and now the audience is waiting for something " straightforward, tough".
They look simple and modest, like awkward teenagers at a school event, then like "village fashionistas": worn shoes, a bright t-shirt and a leather jacket, then in black and emphatically formal. In the photo for the album, the guys pose with a houseplant against the background of old curtains. The other shows them in the kitchen. In an interview with “Flow”, the artists admitted that they record songs in the garage.
Authenticity and unwillingness to look serious is also present in the lyrics: the rhyme is simple, to remember it from the first time and play it in the yard on the guitar - no problem. Acute social (”Proletariat“) and everyday (”Friend") topics, humor and absurdity (”Root") fit well into Russian life far from the capital:
“There is a lot of free time
Factories aren't functioning, it doesn't matter at all
Every day I want to rest
From the fact that there's too much free time”"
The song "Proletariat" describes the life of a person who does not read books, but works at a factory every day from dawn to dusk. Every day he honestly gouges stones and does not look for easy ways to get rich — and now he looks around and sees that those who steal, they are doing great, one got rich, the other made it to the top. But he tells himself that it's a shame to live like this, and he stays where he is.
In Siberia, it is often found that even representatives of some progressive youth — they are not representatives of progressive youth here at all. This is the moral. And those who are already adults, 25-30 years old guys, they are already ossified, at best they play some music on Fridays, and at worst they are just ordinary people. They work, go to the factory at six in the morning with a black bag, in a black tracksuit. This is a very valuable research experience for the group. It is important to note that the group is not inside this, it is as if they were watching it all from the outside.
"You are all here — a crime!" — prison poetics generates not only a sincere chanson, but also quite ironic postpunk. Novosibirsk group "Buerak" made a name on sketches from the life of declassified elements originally from the fictional Ust-Chilim.
The albums feature the Ust-Chilim character, the through-and-through hero of the songs of "Buerak", an inhabitant of a fictional Siberian town who moved to the metropolis. Who does not change during his stay in the big city - he beats an intellectual in the first song or rides a taxi, to the driver of which he expresses sympathy as a representative of the working class.
Buerak originated as a protest against the approach of making pseudo-intellectual postpunk. They wanted to bring an element of absurdity, like the group "Zvuki Mu" at the time. It is obvious that one expressive Peter Mamonov is much better than all the trendy groups.
According to "Afisha" magazine, Buerak is one of the main groups of the so-called "new Russian wave".