Since its first album Svitaye, Palaye, Morwan has evolved. Ukrainian Alex Ashtaui's post-punk project became a duo with the arrival of bassist Stefan Shtuchenko (also active in Кадриль / Quadrille), although Ashtaui continues to write the music and lyrics. Rest assured, if you deduced from the title of this new album (Vse po kolu, znovu can be translated as ‘everything starts again, once more’) that Morwan intended to repeat himself, think again.
Of course, we still find that deep, chanted singing and that taste for cold, urban atmospheres... but very quickly, we discover a new intensity in Morwan. Все По Колу, Знову, the title track, hits us with a new energy, a heavy punk aggression, something almost metal. Morwan's shoegaze introspection has turned into a storm, which Lupashko Oleksii's drums, full of industrial echoes, set off. A raging, hypnotic anthem, Без обличчя gains momentum and hammers its lyrics into our skulls. Morwan has grown and darkened (Остання мить, sinister, veers towards incantation with its suffocating synths and afflicted vocals, like an crossover between doom and post-punk). Rather than moving towards a Molchat Doma or Ploho-style minimalism, Morwan seeks a new sonic complexity with tortured yet organic touches of noise rock, like a continuation of the track Грім on the previous album.
More rhythmic, this second album is also more in-your-face and catchier. There is something alienating about this fever made of clouds and concrete (the melody of Мої дні, a frenetic motif that introduces lyrics thrown out like a slogan, the litanies of Чорні схили that spiral endlessly into darkness). This brings us back to the album title: rather than artistic stagnation, the repetitions mentioned by Morwan are mainly those of musical phrases, which become denser as the tracks swell. This modern trance illustrates more subservience to a ruthless world than an ancestral ritual, echoing a meaningless routine repeated to the point of exhaustion. This second album is as much a furious expression of this malaise as it is its remedy, an incantation to escape the reality to which we are slaves.
The bass bounces, thick, the tracks snap, but Morwan doesn't forget to let this block breathe, allowing more or less discreet Middle Eastern influences to bring touches of warmth and reverie to the minimalist and radical rigour of his music (this is particularly evident on На схід, ‘to the east’). When the pace finally slows down, we're already at the last track, all cold wave melancholy. Rather than a sense of calm, Не чекай has an taste of resignation, of defeat for those who can no longer bear the madness and noise and who seek to escape this relentless modern anxiety, the daily, mechanical cycle of loneliness in the crowd. Morwan hasn't lost the very contemporary melancholy that gave him his soul, but has added muscle and nerve in the form of a new rage, punk and rock impulses that give more power to both the music and the lyrics. This big block of darkness is as disturbing as it is satisfying: let's meet in an underground car park to let it possess us and chant in a circle around it. Our lives are meaningless anyway.
