Ploho – When the Soul Sleeps

When talking about post-punk, there are a few descriptors that always seem to come up. Monochromatic, stark, hopeless, gloomy… you get the idea. If you were to design a landscape based on those same adjectives, it would look an awful lot like Siberia, a region so desolate and unforgiving that Russia has long since decided that its most useful purpose is to home its gulags.

Or at least that’s how Siberia is always made to seem in pop culture. It’s probably unlikely that it’s entirely barren but for the prison colonies. However, the bare-bones post punk of Siberia’s Ploho doesn’t seem to offer much of a counternarrative.

When the Soul Sleeps captures the remote drabness of Cold War-era Siberia that you might think that these nine songs were recorded before the Iron Curtain fell—or that Ploho never got word that the Soviet Union is long gone. Its punchy drums and chorus-drench bass lines are as blunt and direct as a Soviet propaganda poster. The Cure-like bell synths and single-note guitar lines ring like Communist work whistles or distant air ride sirens. And over these government-issued dance party soundtracks, vocalist/guitarist Victor Uzhakov delivers his lyrics in a baritone so unaffected that it sounds like he’s making idle conversation in a bread line.

And yet, for all of its depressive, Brutalist dourness, Where the Soul Sleeps is thrilling. Its spirit lands so close to post punk gods Joy Division that it’s almost not worth bringing up any other influences—and that’s what most bands in the genre are going for so why bother? This is the sort of album that seems tailor-made for spooky dance parties or late-night drives through the city when it feels like you’re the only one awake. It can sound emotionless, but that’s only because it seems to exist in a separation so deep that it’s gone numb. And you don’t need a translator to be able to understand that.

When the Soul Sleeps is available now through Artoffact Records.

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