EVIL BEAR BORIS

This album was originally released in 2015 by Long Arms Records on CD and vinyl, and then in 2019 the addicted label made it available digitally. IWKC, or I Will Kill Chita, do sometimes work under the name of Evil Bear Boris. In fact, different versions of some of these songs can be found on the Evil Bear Boris live 2013 album 'Boris In Action', while they also released an EP 'Das ist Boris'. This is the second album I have come across from IWKC, as I have already reviewed 2017's 'Hladikarna', but this is quite different again. Although it features the same core quartet of Nikita Samarin (drums, percussion), Nick Samarin (keyboards, bass), Andrey Silin (keyboards, theremin) and Artem Litvakoskiy (cello) they have added many more additional musicians this time on strings and brass.

The result is a post rock album quite like anything I have previously come across, as it definitely contains many elements of modern classical music while the band themselves describe it as sympho-punk with turbobass or bearcore. We have enough sub genres of sub genres and I am not really sure if the world is ready for something called bearcore, but post rock with avant tendencies and a desire to include some elements of Art Zoyd is how I would best describe this. Mostly instrumental, this veers between times when it is almost unlistenable to others when it is distinctly melodic, often with the same bass line underneath which keeps it all together. The Addicted label are doing a great job continuing to make albums like this available in a digital format, and there is no reason for not discovering some of the great music coming out of Russia with all these being made available on Bandcamp. The label state they support all types of psychedelic music, and tag themselves with forward-thinking, psych, frogressive, stoner, doom, sludge, experimental, jazz, punk, hard rock, noise rock, avant, ambient, improv, hip hop, post rock\metal, powerviolence, funk, electronic, nevermind, and IWKC certainly tick a lot of those boxes.