A Touch Of Melancholy, A Gentle Menace: On The Wane's Schism - Stereo Embers Magazine Stereo Embers Magazine

Schism is the third record by Kiev’s On the Wane (after 2014’s DRY and 2015’s Sick).

In the last year I realized that something really amazing musically is going on in the former Eastern Bloc countries. A huge scene of post-punk shoegazer bands like Human Tetris and Noir For Rachel are flourishing in Russia and now with On The Wane, the Ukraine is on the alternative map. there and I need a whole article to write about them. These are all fantastic bands with a solid, fully -formed aesthetic and hailing from countries that don’t have a long and influential history in rock music like the western world does. That said, they epitomize the no-border music ideal, where bands may exchange their culture freely and influence each other only with a mouse-click.
<a href="http://onthewane.bandcamp.com/album/schism">Schism by On The Wane</a>

On The Wane sound like a western rock band with an attitude. Their boast a garage-oriented sonic approach, blended by “foggy” melodies on the guitar (that desert rock style) played by Eugene Voitov and Eli Demyanenko equally, and with a scent of an unspecified darkness on vocals by the two ladies in the band, Anna Lyashok (on drums) and Dari Maksimova (on bass). On The Wane specify their music as darkgaze and yeah, I’d say so too as long as that term includes an overdrive in audio, a touch of melancholy and a gentle menace that washes all over the melodies. Our band here is honest and raw as they followed the path of their favorite bands (Sonic Youth, The Cure, Joy Division, The Pixies and Bauhaus), as well as shoegaze heroes like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ringo Deathstarr.

I read in their press kit a little fact that surely influenced their sound: “They rented a garage, went into debt by buying guitar amplifiers, drums and a line, and settled comfortably in the garage until autumn and a little later they recorded their material during a continuous 27-hour session” in another garage-based recording studio.

My first experience from Schism was the astonishing “Human Race” that I played on the radio without a second thought; the song also includes some drum-pads that made it hit a little colder alongside their trademark wall of guitars-wall and confident vocals:

My human race is going down
Since the dawn of time, we are fading out
In peaceful space, the Earth is spinning on its axis
No force to change nature’s laws we are fading out

My human race is going down going down
and all those dying selfish kings in false crowns
My human race is going down going down
My greedy creatures turned on a countdown

highways and roads will be swallowed by woods
rivers and streams will come back to their course
In peaceful space, the Earth will be spinning on its axis
when my human race finally ceases to exist.

Kiev suffered a malicious hell in 2014…here’s the song

And here is their first official video for the Sultry Song which features young people who have seen the meanest ways of supposedly civilized leaders…

So, as you see, the band can excite and comfort you according to their songs’ atmospheric textures. There’s the muscular garage rock of “Human Race,” the mesmerizing groove of “Sultry Song” and the determined darkgaze anthem “Revenge (Deeper Than You Can Imagine)” which features a pretty treacherous and brilliant arrangement.

Home is for experienced people who enjoy all species of sonic fuzzes wherever they come from and don’t mind a gothic-like breakdown in the middle that works as a dark runway to the song’s climax.

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