Review Summary: An electrifying Oriental paradox of Russia!
This is the fifth studio record by a famous Russian singer of Korean descent Anita Tsoy and it will be definitely a significant mark in her music life. Returning to the roots of her carrier in music industry, Tsoy brings us back to the passed ages of "natural" instruments, deep, powerful vocals and soul-tearing songwriting which has been almost lost between ambitious attempts of the modern Russian music market to transfer for dance Europop and increasing popularity of Chanson. At the same time, the album conception is quite unusual for pop music, and that is, expressing Internet social networking themes almost without implementation of electronic programming: guitars, drums and piano only; maximum - electronic guitar. The album is constructed in such a way that all the songs express different moods of one lyrical heroine, mostly connected to the love theme.
The record starts with the introductory interlude, which is a somewhat mixture between Lounge and Oriental music styles, following awesome and emotional single "Broken Love" ("Razbitaya Lyubov") which can be credited for excellent cleaving guitar accords together with aggressive violin strokes and powerful but at the same time, very cold Anita's vocal performance which greatly expresses the problem of love despair, depression and sorrow.
Other parts of the album show very volatile, fast and unpredictable changes in the mood of the lyrical heroine. After the "Broken Love" the album titled single "Yours_A" (Tvoya_A) comes which demonstrates integration of social communication into the global web system through dazzling and a bit reckless guitar strikings together with Tsoy's somewhat robotic, though, powerful singing. This all then changes for some temporary nostalgia and sadness in emotional but bittersweet "Let it Be" ("Nu i Pust") which, then, unpredictably goes for anger and fierceness in "It Hurts" ("Bolno") and "Run Away, Run" ("Ubegai, Begi"). This, instead, changes for some good-memories-theme in "To Remember" ("Pomnit") and further transformation to crazy and even silly, though not stupid, lyrics in "Maybe, it's Love" ("Naverno, eto Lyubov").
The final part is even more chaotic with all the songs being absolutely mood-opposite to each other. Intimate, nerve dazzling and hot "Lipstick" ("Gub-Scotch") versus agressive, harsh and at the same time cold "To Live" ("Zhit") and love-begging "Prayer" ("Molitva"), recklessely desperate and banal "Higher" sung in English versus brilliant calm, shrewd, deep and bittersweet "Silence" ("Tishina"), the latter more going for a traditional guitar ballad with each sounding confirming each word pronounced in the song.
All the album is quite discrepant but it is far not eclectic. Vocals vary from being very nervous and husky to being strong and confident but almost in all the songs Tsoy's performance is quite cold. In the limits of pop-rock and ballad songwriting, Tsoy managed to express the whole social networking system through her own biography of feelings and experiences. And it came out very well: online social networking as a macro-system is a rational, very organized and cold institution, being critisized for diminishing real human communication, while in deep it is a set of millions chaotically distributed moods and emotions transferred through the web.
As a result, it is quite a schizophreniс record expressing micro-schizophrenia of social networks. Anita did a really good job and this album can be bravely called one of the best works she has ever did. But there is one serious thing: Anita must work on her English pronunciation!
