Yanka Dyagileva was a Russian poet and punk/folk hero whose work circulated throughout the country's counterculture underground. They were sometimes shoddy recordings making the rounds on often equally shoddy cassettes (the clandestine duplication/distribution process has been called "magnitizdat," the audio equivalent of samizdat) whose modest packaging couldn't disguise the revolutionary sounds therein. Yanka's first album was titled Ne Polozheno, or "Not Allowed", which makes an emphatic point. She remained reasonably public, earning comparisons to Patti Smith, until 1991, when she went out for a walk one spring day, never to return. When her body was later recovered from a river the death was ruled a suicide (she was known to suffer from depression). She was just 24, and had left behind a legacy of just 29 original songs.
At least Yanka lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union, and if her premature death ended a career rich with potential, what she did record clearly continues to resonate. For proof one need look no further than Ukrainian born but American raised singer Alina Simone, whose recent Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware pays tribute to the late Russian singer.
In some sense the release also works as conduit. Yanka's music never got wide distribution, and, sung entirely in Russian, the meaning of her songs (if not the emotions) won't necessarily reach non-Russian speakers. Alina Simone does stick to Russian when singing Yanka, but at the same time she's made it easier for curious outsiders to enter Yanka's world. At the very least, Yanka's spare, rough-hewn songs are fleshed out with the evocative addition of trumpet, strings, slide guitar, and other favorable chamber embellishments.
Since the songs are sung in Russian, what's left to go by is a) Simone's haunted channeling of Yanka's anguish and b) the song titles, which occasionally provide some useful mood-setting context. "My Sadness is Luminous", for example, perfectly encapsulates the part hopeful, part heartbroken track, which runs less than two minutes and features strings, quiet drums, and minimal acoustic guitar, plus Simone's wistful, sometimes whispered vocals. One might similarly project a yearning for escape onto a song titled "Flocks are Flying", especially as performed here. "Special Reason" and "Sold" (from Yanka's 1989 album of the same name, Prodano!) do indeed recall prime Patti Smith, and could have easily been amplified into something a little less austere than the renditions here.
If the universality of raw emotion transcends any language barrier, at least Simone does provide one translation, for the song "Beware", which could pass for one of PJ Harvey's 4-track demos. It's chilling enough in Russian, but the printed lyrics paint a more explicit portrait of a particularly troubled soul surely shaped by an oppressive life spent in Soviet Siberia:
"I will have to swap the ritualThat I am sick and tired ofFor a deadly missileThe squeaky chair at the tableFor a child's scream around the cornerThe wreath of tangles rosesFor a depressive psychosisThe psychedelic paradiseFor three bolts for the shack
Simone herself has a leg up on most of her listeners, since she understands the literal significance of the lyrics, but it's to her credit that sung in Russian or not, she manages to convey their meanings quite clearly all the same.
