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«We're already 25!». DDT's 25th Anniversary.
A quarter of a century is a symbolic amount of time. For many people these years were the epoch of DDT. As Yury Shevchuk sang in one of his ballads, "Our songs of love and hunger gave birth to a new spring". Shevchuk's words have become a slogan and DDT's music a way of life for thousands of people.
For Shevchuk and his group the date itself isn't important. What's important is that they will debut their new CD, "Vanished Without A Trace" on this tour. The group has worked on these 11 songs — 72 minutes of music — for almost two years. The CD contains a contrast of hard rock together with lyrical and philosophical meditations; screams alternate with whispers. Shevchuk observed that "Every song is an honest conversation about life, about people, about the country, the future, the present and the past. Every song is an ache, a nerve, love." In a word, "Vanished Without A Trace" has already become a classic. Shevchuk compared it with DDT's album "World Number 0": "We didn't plan to do an uncompromising rock album, the kind that we usually like. I tried to write plainly about what is complex. The CD contains a lot of different music. Sometimes the timbre, the musical nuance takes the place of the words. We tried to demonstrate in the first place that Russian rock — it's not just a chanson's songs with drums and guitars added."
The most important composition is the title song "Vanished Wtihout a Trace". As its composer noted, it's not only a song about those who have died in wars. "A person goes out onto the street and vanishes into the masses, they lose their individuality," Shevchuk remarked. "In our country there are an enormous amount of people who have vanished without a trace, more than those who have found themselves. It's about that, which wasn't played or spoken about earlier. It's about loneliness within a crowd."
The musical integrity of the whole album is important, and at the same time each song has its own nuances, it's own color, and it's own melody. Kostya Shumaev, DDT's keyboardist, explained: "We tried to unite all these songs, which are quite diverse dynamically, via the rhythm section of the bass, drums, and some computer sampling. That musical construction lies at the base of almost all of the arrangements." Among these compositions, there are songs that defy structure; they are hard-hitting and dynamic "like wounded soldiers." These contrast with the "nurse's songs" that heal these wounds.
Shevchuk commented that the disk also contains "Some associations with painting…Some albums are like watercolors, some are like cave paintings…it took a lot of work to take a chisel and hammer and carve these mammoths with faces. "Vanished Without a Trace" is a cave, but not only with mammoths… somewhere within it there are also watercolors. It is the product of a mixed technique: watercolor, canvas, oil, and even a little set-design and installation."
DDT's 25th anniversary tour began in June with a concert in Samara, which was followed by hugely successful concerts in their native cities of Ufa and St. Petersburg. They will visit more than 40 cities during the coming year, concluding in 2006 with a concert on Trafalgar Square in London and concerts in the U.S. and Canada. DDT's new tour will appeal to a wide spectrum of concertgoers, and will combine the latest in concert technology with acoustic repertoire. "We want to give a gift to everyone," said Yury Shevchuk. All of the critics agree that they have succeeded!
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