Review of the concert at The Basement
By John Shand
November 17, 2004

Zulya Kamalova could get away with murder. Not because she looks lovely and sings so beautifully, but because hardly any locals understand a word of her Russian or Tartar lyrics. She might be inciting us to bloody revolution, to taking drugs and dancing nude around a statue of Alexander Downer, or other unspeakable horrors.

When she told us that the title of the album she was launching, The Waltz of Emptiness (and Other Songs on Russian Themes), was not "a negative thing" but about the place between two homelands, she could have been pulling our collective leg. All we had to go by was the music.

Since Zulya (her stage name) was last in town she has formed a Melbourne-based band, The Children of the Underground, which has sharpened the focus and the presentation of her songs.

"When Love ..." was made dreamy by the slide guitar of Lucas Michailidis, while Zulya's voice flared to higher notes and sighed to lower ones over the waltz rhythm. For the shrug of the shoulders implicit in "Does It Matter?", each part of the musical jigsaw puzzle was impeccably shaped and placed: press rolls from the brilliant Justin Marshall on snare drum; light, jazzy fragments from Michailidis; crunching piano accordion (Anthony Schulz) and a questioning line from Andrew Tanner on his solid-body double bass. On several songs the band was pared to one or two players, including an exquisite lament called "A Good Reason", when Zulya's voice pleaded against rich arco bass and silvery wisps of accordion.

Zulya has previously focused on her Tartar heritage. The new album is sung in Russian, with her thoughts - musical and verbal - turned to that other cultural legacy of her childhood.

Two songs sung in Tartar reminded us of the differences, but the reality is that whatever language she sings in, the music works because her voice engages us emotionally. It is pretty across its whole range: lustrous when she sings out, and an aural extension of her dreamy eyes and creamy skin when she sings softly.

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