Царица

One of the more quirky finds I've stumbled across in 2016 is this all-female black metal punk trio from Irkutsk in Siberia who adapt popular Russian folk songs to a noisy metal soundtrack. Tsarina's debut release "Tsaritsa" is short enough that all the songs can be played straight without pause as one continuous, ever-wandering soundtrack - and as there are no pauses between songs, I presume that's how the threesome intend this EP to be heard. Five songs including "Toska", "Cheburashka" (this also being the name of a popular children's cartoon character) and "Rodina" ("Homeland" in English) are more or less strung together in a garage-punk / tremolo guitar tapestry, the melodies zooming out of the tinny-sounding BM noise maelstrom in a surprisingly clear and recognisable way. The music might be fast and it sounds cheap and terrible but it's crisp and executed very precisely. Somewhere around the 10th and 12th minutes I can hear the refrain of an old patriotic Soviet war song which with repetition acquires an oddly exotic Middle Eastern air.

The first time I heard this, it all sounded very cheap, nasty and cartoony, but after a few hearings I've started to respect the girls' daring in whacking together beloved folk and pop songs and giving them a blackened punk treatment, complete with quivery tremolo guitars, choppy percussion, an acid tone and spitting, shouty BM vocals, all in the space of less than 20 minutes, and getting out of that melange a clear if deranged and very funny soundtrack. Any BM recording that includes Fiddler-on-the-Roof dance rhythms, happy accordion, spiky blues guitar melodies, bouncy percussion and an insanely fruitcake attitude gets my vote any time (and 10 points for chutzpah).

It won't be in contention for Top Black Metal Release of 2016 but this surely deserves to be listed among the recordings that self-respecting BM fans need to hear at least once in their lives, to be assured that in the universe of Black Metal, anything indeed is not only possible, it has already been done!