Nash Albert

Coming from Georgia (that’s USSR rather than US), Nash Albert has been around a while but still isn’t someone I’m familiar with.

He grew up listening to traditional Georgian folk music before discovering rock & roll (at the time illegal and dangerous in USSR) at the age of about 6. He was instantly attracted to the freedom and protest in this wild new form and eventually, after Perestroika, formed his own band Salamandra. That took him to the US where he struggled and eventually found his way back to Moscow in 1996 – right in the middle of the explosion of gangsterism, drugs and wild clubs – and formed a new band Blast which became very popular in the clubs and discos of Moscow. Blast came to the UK and played the festival circuits in Europe and South Africa.

Through all of this, his music developed, picking up influences from everywhere and with ‘…YET’, his second solo album, it all seems to come together, the album coming over as a totally individual and very passionate statement by a guy whose credentials are wide-ranging and honest.

The opening track ‘Kill The Fear’ opens with a childs prayer in an echoey void before transporting into a Germanic metal mood but swiftly tempers that with a strong and melodic vocal passage. He is really setting out a stall to make the listener unsure of what he is all about. It is very strong but also made me listen closely to the song as he tore it from side to side.

‘Betting On My Fate’ has a distinctly European feel to it, I was hearing elements of Henry Padovani and Al Stewart as Albert’s soft yet impassioned vocal carried the song.
From that point on, I was entranced. There are tracks with the feel of mid-sixties Dylan, others that have a Hawkwind influence, choruses that feel like Gregorian chants, so many parts and pieces. But it is not confused or unnecessarily complex – it really holds together as a piece.

I love the honesty of ‘Cocaine Hangover’ and the simplicity of ‘Marabella’.
Top stuff but not in any way ‘ordinary’