Moskovsky Beat

The flagship Russian rock band Mumiy Troll is preparing a fulllength English-language album, and although the band is unlikely to become a major international hit, getting some new fans in the English-language world doesn’t seem to be an impossible task.

In fact, Mumiy Troll has been working on conquering the English-language music market for a few years. The band, led by Ilya Lagutenko, has played a couple of North American tours and released the English-language EP “Paradise Ahead” and the digital single “Polar Bear” in the United States. And the release of their first full-fledged English-language CD, “Vladivostok,” named after the Russian Far East city in which Lagutenko spent a large part of his childhood and youth, is scheduled for this coming spring.

No doubt, Lagutenko and his band are quite serious about breaking into the North American market. But do they have any chance, or is it as hopeless as similar endeavors of some domestic artists over the last 25 years?

In the second half of the 1980s, a bunch of domestic rock acts, which had just come out of the underground on the wave of perestroika and glasnost, released albums and toured in the West. However, interest was solely driven by a short-lived fashion for everything Soviet, and turned out to be just as short-lived.

And that was fair enough: Russian bands inspired by Western artists looked mostly like their poorer-quality copycats. And even the most original and unique acts, like Auktsyon or Pyotr Mamonov’s Zvuki Mu, had only a very limited appeal among Western music fans.

The biggest record deal – and the biggest flop – was Boris Grebenshchikov’s English-language LP “Radio Silence,” released by Columbia Records in 1989. It’s not that Grebenshchikov’s English wasn’t good enough or his songs written for the album were poor. Moreover, the participation of the primarily Western musicians and crew made the record’s sound contemporary enough. But the album just said nothing new to a Western listener.

In the wake of those perestroikaera disappointments, there was hardly an attempt by a Russian pop or rock act to make a break abroad for quite a long time. The next serious endeavors were undertaken only in the 2000s, resulting in the first and only major international pop project coming from Russia – the fake lesbian act t.A.T.u.

Cleverly capitalizing on the issue of forbidden teenage (same-sex) love, producer Ivan Shapovalov turned Moscow teenagers Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova into international stars, with t.A.T.u. tracks climbing to the top of the charts in many countries. But as soon as the girls grew up, it became clear that the success was based on anything but music, and the duo ceased to exist.

The situation in which Mumiy Troll gingerly steps onto the terrain of the English-language music market is different from that of the early 2000s, not to mention the 1980s. The music industry, which used to be dominated by a handful of big artists targeting the general public and a few heavyweights in the most popular genres, now features numerous niches and subgenres, some of which were even hard to imagine just a few years ago.

And although Mumiy Troll’s material generally falls into the indie rock category, which is already overcrowded, there might be still some niche within that genre where the Russian band would fit in. What may also work for Mumiy Troll is a touch of “bizarreness” and even “freakishness” (no offence!) about the band, which could probably be bridged to “the mysterious Russian soul.”

It is difficult to picture Mumiy Troll as the new stars of the international indie scene, but it’s quite possible that the band’s fan base will include a greater number of English speakers.