Кино ~ Черный альбом (1990)

AKA: Kino ~ Chyorny (1990)

This post brought to you by a guy who knows how hard it is to search the internet for something

who’s name and pronunciation are impossibilities for English speaking keyboards.

About a year ago a friend of mine with a city for a last name showed me a very appealing youtube video of a band playing a song. I couldn’t read what the band or song were, since neither I nor my computer seemed to recognize certain Russian letters, but the music contained therein immediately grabbed hold of my brain banana and sent me off on a frantic and arduous search to figure out what the hell was going on here. To quickly summarize what I’m talking about, it was 80s guitar pop in the mold of The Cure, Go-Betweens, Flock of Seagulls, etc. Only it was a lot more Russian. Call me naive or uncultured, this almost immediately makes songs better for me. Instead of picking apart lyrics and being cynical about them, you can let a shroud of eastern bloc style mystery wash over you with the music. It means what you want it to (cliché bullshit alert!). Honestly though, this song was like experiencing Suedehead without having to shake your head at Morrissey trying to pass off some repetitive nothings as legitimate lyrics.

So, going back to where we left off, this is why I desperately wanted to find more music by this band “Кино.” And initially (see: for about a year) I wasn’t able to uncover much. Maybe it’s cause I was younger and didn’t know as much about googlewebs and the mediafire. Maybe it’s because apparently Кино is a catch-all Russian word for cinema/film that heralds mixed google results (footnote 1), or because there’s a Brit prog rock group that was hogging up the attempted English word searches. What I did find out was that the band, Кино́ (or Kino for the English folk who don’t prefer the backwards Ns) was a guitar pop quartet from Leningrad who were active back from ’81 to ’91. Apparently they amassed a pretty sizable following in the motherland, but never really made their way stateside (I can't imagine why). The more I tried to get a hold of some of their music though, the more obstacles I kept running into. Were the links all hidden beneath Russian cold war codes? Didn't Hasselhoff and Rocky IV combine to end that shit back in the 80s?? I mean, I know the band had been defunct for a long time by this point, but I’d have expected at least some items for sale on Amazon. No dice. So… periodic searches continued.

I’ll skip the rest of the details, as I don’t want to get into some Tolkienesque thing here (which, trust me, this mission was just as complicated and grueling as melting a ring in Mordor), but suffice to say, boom. Problem solved. I gots a Кино album, and now you can have it too via this LINK. Their 1990 album, whose name I'm not even gonna try to confusedly write again, confirmed my initial suspicion: Kino were a really really good band, and I will make every possible effort in the future to hear more of their stuff.

Additional thoughts:

Hahahahahaha, this band was part of the "Perestroika" era in Russia. So I guess Donatello wasn’t just making up musical genres in that movie.

Man, I want to hook up with Russian chicks. I’ll impress them by pulling this out of my album collection. They’ll probably look like that google result chick, which, though dick-breakable, is hot (footnote 1).

Footnote 1:

Google image results for Кино

1. a tough manly looking broad with big cans scowling really hard at the camera

2-15. film related shit

16. it is revealed that Кино́ stole their look from young Bono and Echo and the Bunnymen. Fashion’s weird and cyclical… I predict this ish will be back in style w/in 5 years.