Towards the Within — It Won’t Hurt

Here’s another of my stumble-on bands while listening to music discovery nominally inspired by a resurgence of 1980’s-era post punk and bands like Kælan Mikla, Mochat Doma, as in addition to older bands such as Dead Can Dance.

Another criteria for inclusion is a preference for bands that use a language other than English for their songs, although that is not an absolute requirement. I am more interested in discovering music that I would not have otherwise encountered save for going where the labyrinth leads me.

If you want to listen to other bands that I’ve found, you can follow my YouTube station (all ad revenue goes to the evil overlords, not me), or hit play in the embed at the bottom of this post.

I did not expect it to take me to Аметистовые Вены (translation: Amethyst Veins), a Russian band (specifically, from Naberezhnye Chelny) that popped up in my feed.

Аметистовые Вены do not fit perfectly into a single category: the songs I have listened to by the band (duo?) have ranged from synthwave/darkwave to something you might hear at a rave or a goth dance club — at least one back in the 80s. Their songs run quite the gamut of sounds and I can hear influences from more modern bands as well as that echoed reverb-heavy guitar reminiscent of some early-to-mid Cure, or The Essence.

I wish I could tell you more about the band, but the information is extremely sparse, probably due in no small part to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. While I support Ukraine 100%, I don’t go about holding the decisions of their country’s leadership against Russian artists and musicians. It does, however, perhaps make it more difficult to find details about what Аметистовые Вены might be about.

Choosing a song to share was difficult, but I felt Не будет больно (translated: It Won’t Hurt) lyrically hits all of those postpunk vibes that I’ve been chasing, even if the music itself veers off into dance club territory in parts.

An excerpt (in Russian, then English):

растворяйся в моих руках словно сон
ты в плену моих губ и не чувствуешь боль
разбивайся о мои стены
ночь нам давит вены

умирай
умирай со мной

***

dissolve in my arms like a dream
you are captivated by my lips and do not feel pain
crash against my walls
the night presses on our veins 

die
die with me 

It starts out as a driving song that changes tempo for the first verse, slowing almost entirely to a crawl. Then kicks back in for the chorus with that dance beat. A little different, perhaps, than the music I’ve shared earlier in this series. And yet, it shares some of the elements — sounding quite similar in a number of ways to Kælan Mikla from my previous post for Towards the Within.

The song that first perked up my ears for the band followed that slower sound of previous entries, Нимфа (“Nymph”). But after listening to several of their EPs, I thought I’d depart from the slower tempos when deciding which song to share. I have only listened to about eight of their songs so far, but I have yet to hear one that I don’t like at least in part. I have a few quibbles with the engineering mix on a few songs, but that’s not the focus of this series and I can overlook those details while listening.

If you like the two songs I showcased, I absolutely encourage you to check out other songs of theirs. You can also find them on Bandcamp, if you want to see what they have for their digital EPs.

Want to hear more? Want to revisit songs from previous posts on Towards the Within? Then check out the YouTube playlist I’ve curated below: