Detsky Panadoll - "AM"
(2000, Discocsid/Citadel)

    After being held up in pressing and distribution for more than a year, the long-awaited debut from Detsky Panadoll is here. (OK, so they put out Ubit zaitsa? [Kill the Rabbit?] way back when, but that had a drum machine on it, so it doesn’t really count.) Although these guys have been through a dizzying array of lineup changes since we caught their legendary first live show in a sweaty, packed Novokuznetskaya podval some four years ago, the sound remains the same: straight-ahead funk and old-school hip-hop mixed, shaken, and well stirred with an ever-changing selection of world-music influences.
    Backed by a rhythm section so steady you could set your watch to their pulse, vocalists Yura Dementiev and Marc Schliefer (he’s the one in the red Iverson jersey) kick out 16 solid jams of surprising range. From the afro-inflected sounds of “Musaravizde” and “Zandala” to upbeat live standards like “Supersonic,” “Who’s Got the Bounce,” and “Paravozy,” AM keeps the intensity level high, even when the band is at its quietest.
    Other standout tracks include the record’s first single, “Ne udar menya telezhkoi!” [“Don’t Hit Me with That Cart!”], which you may have caught on MTV (or at least you would have if they weren’t so busy playing circa-1993 kindercore rap videos by the pint-sized son of the channel’s owner), and the dynamic “Utro v Damasske” [“Morning in Damascus”], which builds insidiously from a slow groove reminiscent of Peter Gabriel’s music for The Last Temptation of Christ into a powerful vehicle for Dementiev’s impressive vocal abilities. I can’t tell what the fuck he’s singing about, but it sounds damn good... phat, even.
    On the downside, the album was recorded when they still had that pipsqueak alto sax player in the lineup—in all fairness though, his playing does sound ballsier here than it ever did live. On the other hand, the bass sound is on the tinny side and definitely lacking in some of the bottom end that propels the band’s driving live performances with such immediacy.
    But these are trifling complaints against the full-length debut from one of the first groups to prove definitively that rap can sound cool and rock hard in Russian. Four years is a hell of a long-time on the Russian hip-hop scene. And if the local music scene is at all lucky, Detsky Panadoll will still be around after another four, just about the time the current batch of otechestvenny pop-rap practitioners are coming out of their posh London finishing schools.