After a five-year hiatus, in 2019, the band from Moscow, The Retuses, released the album OMYT. The band's lead singer, Misha Rodionov, locked himself in his home studio and wrote over four hours of instrumental and vocal music, but only 17 tracks made it onto the album, which has a runtime of 50 minutes. 

The album doesn't have a very specific storyline, but it's very vivid and relatable. It's like the warmth from a stranger at a bar who decides to unexpectedly share something interesting with you. And there, one person in the noise of the crowd speaks in an unknown language about their life, while the other, responding to the words they can make out, nods their head. There are many repeated words about spring, time, memory, days, seas, life. 

I understand «OMYT» as a single story of transition — from love to breakup, searching for oneself, the desire to forget and then to remember. The protagonist wanders, finds love, loses it, regrets, becomes alienated, but in the end, accepts reality. Memory is a dream / White day / Whirlpool on a lame horse (from the finale «TYMO») — the words closing the album don't seem joyful or optimistic, but they feel alive, and... realistic. 

It all sounds like one big performance, which Misha had originally planned. The unity of voice, text, and music is so seamlessly woven that there's no feeling of intermissions. The instruments, structures, fabric, the insides of the tracks constitute a separate world — there's nothing superfluous, nothing grates on the eye (or rather, ear) and nothing sticks out. Guitar, bass guitar, trumpet, synthesizer, drums, etc., are assembled into a cohesive canvas of characters who change locations, moods, and roles from scene to scene. 

The album's excessive imagery could potentially alienate, but: Oh, beautiful life / I want to tell you something / Teach me to be silent better (from the intro «OMYT»), It was never with me (from «ESCAPISM») and: As much light, so much drama / How many years to these gardens / I flew up to fall at your feet (from the penultimate track «VARANSI B*RN») — there's no feeling of understatement, huge abstraction, or difficult perception. On the contrary, it makes you want to associate yourself more with the protagonist, empathize with him, share his troubles and joys. The more I listened again, the stronger the feeling became that the album is for everyone. 

The cover contributes interestingly — a stencil gradient of the word «OMYT» from light green to light blue on a dark background. The mood of repetition and alienation, decadence, and change (not from good to bad or vice versa, but in a general sense). The picture transforms into separate steps when zoomed in and into a single ramp when zoomed out — as if showing me a monitor through a phone, and the waves of pixels flicker and shimmer. The feelings of dedication and talent that I felt are incomparable to any artist of our time. Recording all tracks on analog equipment, followed by digitization and mixing on modern equipment — is the main technical beauty of the album. This fact so stunned me that I couldn't take the modern music scene, including my own, seriously for some time. 

A million instruments of absolutely different models and origins — Misha has been collecting musical instruments since 2003. For example, the first guitar, which broke into splinters three times (the intro «OMYT» was recorded on it) and the trumpet, which I grew so fond of for its cheapness, dullness, and ordinariness. Each instrument has its own story, its own purpose in the album. 

Mastering the tracks in three sleepless days, crazy self-isolation for 5 years, ears blurred from listening to the same material, abstract song titles — this is such a lively and frenzied work. Misha didn't kill the timbres of the instruments, didn't squeeze the space, didn't shred the dynamics — in one sentence — Rodionov stands against the loudness war and most trends in contemporary music. Everything that needed to be done to make the album sound better — he did. No more, no less. This is a rare thing.

I believe and hope that the album gives birth to new craftsmen («new» from innovation) — to break the mold, not to follow everyone, to make music in a home studio that leaves no chance when you meet it. It affects so much that it divides the world's perception into before and after. It accompanies in moments of disasters and joys. It shares moments of love, embarrassment, triumph, rage. It leaves behind eternity. 

The character of the album is absolutely unique. Its fabric is homogeneous, the vocals with the text and music merge into one sea: you drown, choke, surface, get out. The canvas of «OMYT» is woven from a very great love: both the threads of the plot from words and the instrumentals — warm, native — create a theater in which music strikes memory, creates images, the very scene, and the characters. Instant association. 

It's impossible to highlight specific, separate works, generalize or compress — I think Misha achieved this. Because of the album's imagery, it's hard to highlight some message or main thought and I think that's a big advantage — everyone will perceive it in their own way/fit it to themselves. Personally, «OMYT» gives me many contradictions: warmth and cold, hope and meaninglessness, freedom and dependence. The album is so alive, so sincere and real that you don't want to turn on shuffle or add it to a playlist with other people's works. A separate world in which you want to be. Into which you want to fall. 

I've been with this album for about four years and it only gets better. Now it listens just as freshly, just as experimentally, just as new as it did in 2019. Terribly grand, impossibly beloved, sincere, vulnerable, sensitive — Misha Rodionov and his youth, which he traded for the album «OMYT». 

Thank you, The Retuses.