SSLYBY

From Russia with love

Fill up your Lada with cheap vodka, it’s time to come out of your makeshift nuclear bunker and meet the real Cold War Kids.

Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin are Philip Dickey (singer/drums/guitar), Will Knauer (guitar), John Robert Cardwell (vocals/bass), and Jonathan James (drums/bass). Just where the band’s affection for the 75-year-old reclusive tennis-playing (Yeltsin once told an audience in Stockholm that Bjorn Borg’s face reminded him of meatballs) and infamously un-sober ex-Soviet leader comes from is anyone’s guess. Boris Yeltsin stepped down from office when Dickey was 7.

Philip Dickey’s first band, Thinking Version, attempted to ape the sound of Nirvana until a partnership with Will Knauer took it all in a much less gloomy direction. SSLYBY released their debut album, Broom, which was recorded in an attic over a period of eight months, in March of 2005. They posted a few MP3s on their intentionally lo-fi website (which heralded them modestly as “the third best band” on their street) and rapidly found themselves propelled to indie audio blog stardom. “Internet fame doesn’t make sense to us,” says Philip Dickey at the time. “I don’t think our lead singer has an e-mail address.” It comes as no real surprise after listening to Broom that, in fact, all the songs contained on the album were written for one particular girl – a former girlfriend of drummer/vocalist Philip Dickey. It this achingly heartfelt and modest approach to making music that is SSLYBY’s appeal. “We want to write songs that you know no one else can come up with – a song that really matters to one person,” says Dickey.

In April 2006 – with the quartet still without a record label – the band’s most prominent song ‘Oregon Girl’ made its way onto an episode of The OC. A reissuing (and re-mastering) of Broom followed with their eventual signing to Polyvinyl Records, and their highly-anticipated second album, Pershing, was released on 8th April 2008. The track ‘Oceanographers’ shows their new polished production in full effect; whereas ‘I Think I Wanna Die’ still wrestles with the same melodies and shoegazing disenchanted pop that made their early recordings so charming. Their song ‘Annie Elephant’ recently appeared in a Mastercard advert, which aired during the American Idol final.

For a band that was heralded as the one that “could succeed The Shins”, they, unlike their namesake, are certainly not staggering sideways from music’s presidential podium. US Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbot said that during the Clinton years, “Yeltsin was so drunk when he arrived in the airport in September 1994 that he could barely get off the plane. The same night Yeltsin was staggering around in his underpants shouting for pizza.” What’s not to love?

The band is currently touring the American Midwest and come to the UK in September. Playing at both The Borderline (11th) and the End Of The Road Festival (12th).

http://www.morawk.com/boris/

http://www.myspace.com/boris

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - ‘Think I Wanna Die’

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - ‘Annie Elephant’ (Mastercard Commercial)