Far from Moscow, a criminally intoxicating strand of Russian music

It's not easy to talk about Blatnyak. The word itself sounds kind of distasteful from here. For Russian speakers, the response is typically worse. Try as he often does, Andrew Tanner can think of no parallel in western music that holds up to translation.
"It's this particular subgenre of Russian folk music which is really the only true folk music," says the contrabass balalaika player of Vulgargrad. Then he stops himself.
"Most Russians would be horrified by that suggestion and I respect that objection. Because this was a music that was basically so worthless that nobody would touch it."
Steeped in tales of the criminal underground, loaded with coarse humour and slang, passed on by word of mouth over campfires and vodka, Blatnyak was never a candidate for official state broadcasting.
Even in its post-Glasnost incarnation, it's a kind of music so cheesy in execution — nasty '80s synth-and-drum machine productions abound — that Tanner reckons the very existence of his band would be considered "disappointing" on the streets of Moscow.
That's where he first heard it, literally underground in the Russian capital, nearly 20 years ago. The Melbourne musician was over there teaching English when he was exposed to magnitizdat — pirated reel-to-reel tapes — at a basement party.
In a flash of hungover inspiration, he decided to bring it home and launch an Australian mutation. Vulgargrad made their first demo tape in 2004. This month they launch The Odessa Job, their latest album of borrowed and beefed-up criminal underworld classics and gypsy folk ballads.

Sitting with him at a streetside cafe in Carlton is the man without whom the crazy idea might never have left the rehearsal room. Jacek Koman is a Polish-born actor, best known as the gravel-voiced tango-meister gargling Roxanne in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge.
Koman escaped the Soviet shadow of his homeland in the early '80s. "I proudly pull out my refugee visa occasionally and show it to my kids," he says. Despite his resistance to Russian indoctrination as a teenager, he's fluent enough in the language and the musical tradition in question to bring a big dose of gravity to Vulgargrad's act.
"I had some knowledge of the Russian branch of it but quite a good knowledge of the Polish stuff," he says. "I used to, as a kid, see guys walking around with banjo, guitars and accordions; three or four guys playing in the yard of buildings and everyone would be listening from the windows. You'd wrap some money in paper and throw it to them.
"It was not forbidden but similarly to the Russian situation, it was never endorsed. Not until maybe the '70s and even then, the state would still look down on it."

He remembers many of the songs and folkloric characters that weave through Vulgargrad's repertoire: port city thieves and smugglers such as Alyosha and Aunty Haya. The traitorous Murka is so enshrined in tradition that she spawned at least one sequel, recorded on The Odessa Job. At shows, Russian expats sometimes call her name, "a bit like an Australian might call out of for Khe Sanh," Tanner says. "They don't necessarily want to hear it, but it's important for them to yell it out."
Koman volunteers affinity with a song called Wolf Hunt, by folk hero Vladimir Vysotsky. It's sung from the viewpoint of a wolf brought up to fear the danger of wandering beyond the red flags... "but now we're being hunted. We're living targets for these men with rifles so we have to go for it."
"It's a very dramatic song. You know, [Vysotsky] wrote and performed that song at times when if you even mentioned the colour red you could feel the excitement; the thrill run through an audience. And the guys in dark suits would start taking notes…
"So yes, I feel it," he says. "This material is charged for me. I'm not hoping to pass it on necessarily, but magically, as it happens, something gets translated. The emotion of it, somehow, without being too specific, comes through."
With horns drunkenly reeling and rhythms often lurching to the up-tempo madness of ska and klezmer, plenty of energy clears the language barrier on record. Vulgargrad's expat following also heightens excitement in concert, Tanner says, even when their relative number is small.
"Just having them there, that five per cent with the cultural knowledge, it becomes kind of infectious. There might be 10 people at the front singing along to all the songs and that has an amazing effect on the rest of the audience. ‘Wow, what the hell is this? What's going on?"'
That question, given the odd mix of Russian loathing and sentimentality and local fans' near unanimous non-comprehension, is hard to answer. But the sheer propulsion of the music, the band's earthy instrumentation and Koman's thespian touch probably accounts for much of it.
"I do feel sometimes like we're rescuing this stuff from the hands of crude muzak masters," the singer says. "It's a kind of alchemy, what happens. For me, it is such a great learning experience to witness this shit music going into the melting pot and becoming gems.
"For people who know it, they are probably relieved that this music finds its own life; new life and new expression. We convert a lot of them. Once they see that material in the hands of great musicians, they are converts."
He can say that, he adds, "because I'm just the guy with a microphone" — although he admits it's a role with unusual challenges.
"It's a slightly different kettle of fish to acting. It's closer to stand-up comedy, almost. As an actor when you're in a play or a film, you hide behind characters. Here it wasn't immediately obvious who the character was until he kind of emerged. Now he feels like he's got more of me than the characters created for stage or screen."
It's some irony, he acknowledges, for a man who did his best to fail Russian at school as an act of resistance. "This is my revenge now," he says.

Vulgargrad play the Corner Hotel on April 26.