Agata Kristi (Agatha Christie): 5 Sickest Albums of the Band
Let's get down to business.
Who Are Agata Kristi?
Formed by the cousins Vadim Samoilov (guitars, vocals) and Gleb Samoilov (bass guitars, guitars, vocals), Agata Kristi is a very unique music band, despite being very well-known in the Russian mainstream.They started in 1985 and gained popularity as a rock band (though they have always been too unique for any standard genre label). At first, their style combined rock music with operetta, pop music, and other elements. Then they gradually transferred to more electronic, darker and sicker sound, while being already well-known.
In this article, I will tell you about their albums after 1995, when they acquired this sinister and depressive sound that they borrowed from the classic 80s darkwave and gothic rock and took it even further.
Chudesa (Miracles), 1998
I've already shared this album in my
list of the most depressing electronic music albums and songs, and here I will share more details about it. If they released something
like this without already having a huge fan base, it would never be accepted
by a major label and get promoted on national TV and radio: it’s too sick and
depressive for the mainstream. In fact, the music video for the second track
“Doroga Pauka” (“Path of the Spider”) was rejected by one of the national
channels because of the “depressive character of the song”.
Gleb Samoilov, the singer, guitarist, and the author of the most part of the
songs, characterized the genre as “kind of decadent retro techno” in one part
of the songs and “a combination of a guitar sound with a naivety of a drum
machine” in another. He also pointed out that the album took as its base the
“new wave” of the beginning of the 80s in terms of the sound and the mood.
Upon the release, they were criticized for it, as it wasn’t something fancy
and modern in 1998.
According to Gleb’s answer to an interview question about the meaning of the
title of the album, the lyrical part of this album is dedicated to miracles,
fairy-tale, an alternate reality:
“Chudesa [miracles in Russian] are chudesa. It’s a fairy tale, a miracle,
it’s what every person dreams about in the depth of their soul, maybe even
without realizing it. This world is not the only one—there is another
reality—more fair and real, where a fairy tale is possible, a miracle is
possible, justice is possible. At least, in our country people have thought
like this for centuries”.
However, while listening to the album, I have an impression that the “reality”
portrayed by means of the
music
and lyrics on this album is something very few people want to imagine and
escape to. It’s more like a nightmare—sometimes violent, sometimes
depressive. Or, probably, the mood of the songs actually mostly reflects
certain scary and depressing things from the real world that are the reasons
why the band members wanted to escape to an alternate reality.
While recording it, the band was going through some kind of crisis, getting
frustrated by how the music industry requirements were influencing their
music. During that period they took enormous amounts of drugs. As a result,
the album became the darkest, the creepiest work they have ever recorded.
The album was recorded in a home studio of one of the band members during the
economic crisis in Russia (that involved the currency default).
Chudesa stands out not only from all other music but also from the
whole discography of the band. According to Gleb Samoilov, it’s an underrated
album. And as for me, it’s my favorite one of the band’s albums.
Майн кайф (Mein Kaif), 2000
Mein Kaif is the next album after “Chudesa”. It differs with its more aggressive tone. The album features more abrasive distorted guitars and dryer (less reverbed) sound than on “Chudesa”. In terms of emotions, it’s more sadistic and hysterical.
Gleb’s sick, threatening, sarcastic maniacal voice gives even more creeps than
on “Chudesa”. Just listen to this song — На дне (At the Bottom):
It’s a conceptual album where each song is a chapter of one story. And the
main character of it is a cruel maniac going through the events of WWII. Hence
the title “Mein Kaif”, which is an allusion to Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”.
“Kaif” in Russian is a slang word that means “pleasure”.
Citation from the official press release:
This album is about a boy, in whose soul an internal upheaval happened after a personal trauma, after which he became a merciless, bloodthirsty murderer, and about how he finally realized this.
Gleb Samoilov:
Unlike in "Chudesa", there is much guitar here, including acoustic, many songs are crazy ballads. Of course, with a hint of mysticism. Everything together represents a story of one human soul.
-
We could also dedicate this album to Goebbels, but nobody would print this. But if you are curious, one of the basises of this album is the destiny of Doctor Joseph Goebbels. A person who started from sublime Christian ideals and actually was the ideologist of the currently so-called fascism. That's how the person's destiny changed from right ideas to the impossibility of bringing them to life the way he wanted. Hence the manifestations of a senseless cruelty. And then, finally, a suicide and murder of all his family. That's a very interesting destiny he had. From being in love with Russia and fanatic dedication to Dostoevsky and his ideas to concentration camps and the war with the same Russia. And the collapse.
-
The reissue of this album, titled “Post-Album”, features an additional song “Pulya” (Bullet) that comes right after the intro.
Citation from the official press release:
This album is about a boy, in whose soul an internal upheaval happened after a personal trauma, after which he became a merciless, bloodthirsty murderer, and about how he finally realized this.
Gleb Samoilov:
Unlike in "Chudesa", there is much guitar here, including acoustic, many songs are crazy ballads. Of course, with a hint of mysticism. Everything together represents a story of one human soul.
-
We could also dedicate this album to Goebbels, but nobody would print this. But if you are curious, one of the basises of this album is the destiny of Doctor Joseph Goebbels. A person who started from sublime Christian ideals and actually was the ideologist of the currently so-called fascism. That's how the person's destiny changed from right ideas to the impossibility of bringing them to life the way he wanted. Hence the manifestations of a senseless cruelty. And then, finally, a suicide and murder of all his family. That's a very interesting destiny he had. From being in love with Russia and fanatic dedication to Dostoevsky and his ideas to concentration camps and the war with the same Russia. And the collapse.
-
The reissue of this album, titled “Post-Album”, features an additional song “Pulya” (Bullet) that comes right after the intro.
Ураган (Uragan / Hurricane), 1996
This is the previous album to “Chudesa”. Its mood has the same shades, but
it’s just a little bit (very little bit) less sick. It’s more
guitar-oriented.
The album starts with a basic four-chord progression on an acoustic guitar. Too simple to be something interesting at first glance, but it’s compensated by the mood the singer creates shortly after.
The album starts with a basic four-chord progression on an acoustic guitar. Too simple to be something interesting at first glance, but it’s compensated by the mood the singer creates shortly after.
The ending is the saddest song on the album. The music video for the opening
song “Dva Korablya” (“Two Ships”) ran in the USA on MTV and was featured in
Beavis and Butt-Head, where the characters were watching and commenting on
it.
Gleb Samoilov:
Uragan is an absolutely non-conformist album, a kind of opened nerve. We had a terrible exhaustion, there was an attempt to escape from the show business reality to drugs.
This all gave us a horrible disappointment in everything we used to believe in and a weak hope that there was still something we could believe in.
On one hand, the same is true for all the songs from this disc—the feeling of how tragic all that was happening was: "All my toys, mama, were swept away by the hurricane, there is no fairy-tale..." (citation from the song "Hurricane / Uragan")—the statement of fact.
But on the other hand, the yearning for the lost paradise, confidence in the existence of something ethereal and sadness because of the impossibility of being able to recuperate it.
-
When we were writing "Uragan", I was going crazy, I was desperately clinging to the life, I didn't understand what I had to continue living for. I was finding myself on the very edge of existence and nonexistence, when you feel any pain the most acutely. When I watched TV and learned that miner's weren't paid, I wanted to throw myself out of the window, because I had my nerves naked. I understood that I either had to express what I was feeling, or explode like a balloon. I was painfully thinking what I had to continue to live for and I found the outlet—everything into the verses. For me, the best way of fighting my inner demons is to express them in songs. I don't know how people who don't write songs, poems, or books cope with this.
-
Interviewer's question: Did you count how many corpses you have in all of your songs [on the album]?
Gleb: That's terrible. At first, I didn't even think about it, and then, after listening the album "Uragan", I found that there was not a single song that didn't have a word "deadman" or "death".
Interviewer: what caused the appearance of this symbol of death?
Gleb: My birth.
Gleb Samoilov:
Uragan is an absolutely non-conformist album, a kind of opened nerve. We had a terrible exhaustion, there was an attempt to escape from the show business reality to drugs.
This all gave us a horrible disappointment in everything we used to believe in and a weak hope that there was still something we could believe in.
On one hand, the same is true for all the songs from this disc—the feeling of how tragic all that was happening was: "All my toys, mama, were swept away by the hurricane, there is no fairy-tale..." (citation from the song "Hurricane / Uragan")—the statement of fact.
But on the other hand, the yearning for the lost paradise, confidence in the existence of something ethereal and sadness because of the impossibility of being able to recuperate it.
-
When we were writing "Uragan", I was going crazy, I was desperately clinging to the life, I didn't understand what I had to continue living for. I was finding myself on the very edge of existence and nonexistence, when you feel any pain the most acutely. When I watched TV and learned that miner's weren't paid, I wanted to throw myself out of the window, because I had my nerves naked. I understood that I either had to express what I was feeling, or explode like a balloon. I was painfully thinking what I had to continue to live for and I found the outlet—everything into the verses. For me, the best way of fighting my inner demons is to express them in songs. I don't know how people who don't write songs, poems, or books cope with this.
-
Interviewer's question: Did you count how many corpses you have in all of your songs [on the album]?
Gleb: That's terrible. At first, I didn't even think about it, and then, after listening the album "Uragan", I found that there was not a single song that didn't have a word "deadman" or "death".
Interviewer: what caused the appearance of this symbol of death?
Gleb: My birth.
Опиум (Opium), 1995
This album is previous to Uragan. It's less dark, but the overall feeling of
its songs is ironic, and even sarcastic. Sometimes slightly creepy.
There are a few songs that I don't like that much, such as "Sadness Without
End" (second track) or "Eternal Love" (fourth track), because they sound too
poppy and happy (if you don't listen to the lyrics). But others like
"Transylvania" or "Violence" are very good. As well as the eleventh song
"Opium for Nobody", which was a huge hit in Russian-speaking countries back in
the day, and despite that, it's wonderful:
"Opium" was a provocation that the society bought. People bought all that
was provocative in the album. We expected that, but we didn't expect that
the show business would assimilate us so quickly and make us a part of
itself. We found ourselves completely unprepared to the system of tours,
constant attention, surveillance...
During that time, unfortunately, the most part of our fans were this kind of fanatic teenage girls who saw in Opium princesses, Strauss, and all castle-in-the-air-related. But they didn't see our irony and laughing at themselves [maybe he meant "ourselves"—in Russian it's unclear in this case].
-
Interviewer:
The mood of the album is all-time gloomy. Was the Decadence the main
goal?
As for the Decadence... I don't think that it some degenegation, as for me, not at all. Let's say, it's the return to the art for the sake of the art, so to what was the main idea of Decadence itself.
No matter how egoistic it is, "Opium" is the album about me. "Decadence"
[the previous album] was a compilation of ballads about various phenomenons
in life. "Shameful Star" [one of the previous albums] was about my
relationship with love, and "Opium" is dedicated to me personally. In
"Shameful Star" there was a conflict—"he-she". In "Opium", you can see my
conflict with myself. And there is nothing funny about it.
-
In "Opium", the main character stops to take a look at himself and just
turned himself inside out. And it turned out to be sad because he has
done too little. Sorrow—because a crucial moment, the peak has come, and there is a feeling of a
complete obscurity ahead. And for reaching a new peak it's necessary to go
down at first. Because at a certain stage you've already reached
something, and you understand that you must renounce it so you can do
something else. So you've renounced it, but there is emptiness ahead, for
now.
In the new songs I tried to capture this despair (and desperation) of a
person who has made a decision—as a farewell to former himself. It's like a little death that
precedes a new birth. And no matter the sadness and sorrow, there is
something light in the album. Because this tale is about something
bright, that has reached the bloom and dying. because there is no room
for a further bloom.
-
In my opinion, all that is romantic in art is the yearning for the past, and particularly for childhood. You are trying to restore the feelings that you actually didn't have in your childhood either. But it's a kind of mysticism I specialize in to such extent that I'm trusted to write lyrics.
Триллер (Thriller), 2004
"Thriller. Part 1" is the album released after "Mein Kaif" and after the death
of their keyboardist, who was an important member of the band as a composer
and sound engineer.
Though the title contains "Part 1", they have never released "Part 2".
Instead, they released their last album "Epilogue" in 2010, toured, released a
live album from their farewell tour, and disbanded.
"Thriller" is not that dark and creepy. Though many of the songs are sad and /
or neurotic (for example, the opening one), but overall it has an upbeat and
more rock and roll feel. It's still a very good one.
Here is a music video for the title track where Samoilov cousins are trying to
look like they are cool:
Gleb Samoilov:
We only know that the analysis of our depressive state is totally over. The
album "Mein Kaif" exhausted this topic completely. We understood that we had
recorded the darkest disc of the band, and we had no force, neither interest
in continuing to weep about our sicknesses. We wanted something, if not
life-asserting, then at least life-protecting.
Interviewer:
That's quite a sensation! Agata Kristi decided to squeeze from themselves
radiant positive?
Gleb:
We will not be able to be positive anyway. Probably, we aren't yet such
professional hypocrites enough for writing songs in C-major while feeling
something completely different. The music will transmit our primordial
state.
-
Interviewer:
There is a prominent feeling of the 80's fashion in the album.
Gleb: Well, we bought various analogue synthesizers for this very purpose. There is something from cyberpunk and synth-pop.
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