Brigadniy Podryad – 20 brave boys
After some introductory skirmishes, this story opens with a drum roll in the very first sentence. Twenty brave boys hurry off to war (двадцать бравых ребят на войну спешат), and you’re right there with them. Brief description: prikaz on their chest, and before that, a machine gun (а в груди у них приказ на груди автомат).
Group character sketch: У одного из них жена у других лишь вина / Что не допили до конца свой стакан винца – one of them has a wife, the others only regret that they couldn’t finish their glass of wine.
In the
lyrics, it says бокал (also
here and elsewhere), but стакан is more fitting. A бокал would be too fancy – this is the common folk, and they drank from a regular glass, not a wine glass.
Going down
The chances for the group don’t seem very high, and the outlook isn’t promising. Мы всё вряд ли дойдём до конца: we probably won’t all make it to the end. Especially not когда на каждого из нас уже по три тонны свинца – when each of us has already caught three tons of lead (bullets). But onward, forward march. Almost as if something is being celebrated.
Vacant
When the calm returns, another one is taken again, in a changed perspective. Я знавал лишь одного из тех ребят: I only knew one of those boys. Он первый пал в бою от разрывов гранат: he was the first to fall in battle, from grenade blasts. He lived in the house across the river (oн жил в доме за рекой) and wasn’t a bad guy (он был парень неплохой). But ever since he left (но с тех пор как он ушёл), that house has always been empty (дом постоянно пустой).
Ребят, this is Бригадный Подряд.
It can be found on
Реинкарнациа 2 (2016).
For guitarists:
chords and
Sergey Tirskikh (2019).
Most of the music here is also in an
R1 playlist on YouTube (in order of posting).
See also
Best Russian Music and
Russian Song Lyrics.
More
Music
Anyone who wants to present Russian music cannot ignore Zemfira. Popular and mainstream – millions of records sold – but also distinctly idiosyncratic. The music is usually accessible (we categorize it under Pop), but the attitude is rock.
Raw Anti-Putin punk from
Nizhny Novgorod /
Нижний Новгород. Loosely based on ‘Maggie’ by The Exploited.
From the green city of
Zelenograd /
Зеленоград. Dreamy indie-folk with a melancholic undertone. Created by
Mikhail Rodionov (1992).
The alarm blares (Ревёт тревога), the road awaits (ждёт дорога). They are many (Их немало), we are few (нас немного). We are in an unjust world (Мы в несправедливом мире) tin wolves in the shooting range (Жестяные волки в тире).
The word offret is Swedish and means ‘sacrifice’; the band Offret is Russian and makes heavy music. The link between the word and the band: a
1986 film in Swedish by the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky.
A band from Saint Petersburg that makes a kind of post-punk/indie-pop. Not for long yet, so not much material yet. However, they already have a few very successful tracks with original music videos. До свиданья, дорогая is the
Russian title for the film
The Goodbye Girl (1977), but it has nothing to do with it.
