Music / Molchat Doma

Left to right: Roman Komogortsev, Egor Shkutko, and Pavel Kozlov

Why does this anguish feel so good?

— Toska

Molchat Doma (Молчат Дома, Russian for 'Houses Are Silent') are a Belarusian Post-Punk and Dark Wave band formed in Minsk in 2017. Despite being Belarusian, all of their songs are in Russian, a language they have confessed to be more comfortable writing and singing in (it's widespread in their country).

They're most well known for their Breakthrough Hit album Etazhi (Floors), their second in 2017. This contains by far their most well known song, "Sudno" (Bedpan), a poem set to music about dying in a hospital bed written by a poet who later killed himself. Much of their music features themes and imagery of despair, urban decay, and post-Soviet misery.

As you can tell they're a very cheerful band.

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Members:

• Egor Shkutko (vocals)
• Roman Komogortsev (guitar, synthesizer, drum machine)
• Pavel Kozlov (bass guitar, synthesizer).

Discography:

• С крыш наших домов(Romanised: S krysh nashikh domov), (English: 'From the Roofs of our Houses'). Self-released album, 2017. Reissued by Sacred Bones Records in 2020.
• Этажи (Romanised: Etazhi), (English: 'Floors'). Detriti Records, 2018. Reissued by Sacred Bones Records in 2020.
• Монумент (English/Romanised: 'Monument'). Sacred Bones Albums, 2020.

Molchat Doma provide examples of:

• Break-Up Song: "Toska" sounds like one, with the man wanting to see 'Toska' (misery, which is personified here) go, asking 'her' to give the keys back etc.
• Broken Record: The below lyrics from "Sudno", which are either a Madness Mantra or a Survival Mantra depending on how you look at it.
• Central Theme: Almost all of their songs and albums revolve around bleak, oppressive environments; even their name reflects their constant references to architecture.
• Crapsack World: Their music has a heavy emphasis on setting rather than characters; their music creates the impression of a very bleak, funeral setting, reflecting the band's apparent view of Post-Soviet Europe.
• Death Song: "Sudno".
• Deliberate VHS Quality: Their video for "Kletka" ("Cage") has VHS static and scan lines to add to the gloomy Retraux feel.
• Deranged Animation:
  • The music video of "Toska" has some surreal hand-drawn animation parts with a girl falling, exploding, shrinking and exploding, and her face serves as a mask to the live-action woman of the video at one point.
  • The black blots in that of "Sudno" also qualify.
• Driven to Suicide: Boris Ryzhy, the poet who wrote the lyrics to "Sudno". Knowing this makes the song invokedeven eerier than it already is.
• Dystopia: Their music has a dark, oppressive vibe influenced by memories of Eastern Bloc communism.
• Idiosyncratic Cover Art: All of their albums are dreary-looking pictures of strikingly oppressive - or perhaps strangely beautiful - buildings built by communist regimes:
  • The cover of С крыш наших домов shows the infamously incomplete Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea.
  • The cover of Этажи shows the Hotel Panorama in Slovakia.
  • The cover of Этажи shows the Monument to Party Founding, also in North Korea, with the background edited to fog and the Korean text on the plinth edited to read the album name.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All of their album titles contain references in some way to buildings, as does their band name.
• Lyrical Dissonance: Many of their songs are pretty danceable. If you understand the lyrics, they're also ungodly depressing.
• Madness Mantra: The narrator in "Sudno", desperately trying not to slip away in a hospital bed:
  And I'm trying to get up
  I want to look it in the eyes
  Look in its eyes and fall into tears
  And never die, never die
  Never die, never die, never die
• Retraux: Their music might best be described as "Joy Division... if they were formed in 1980s Soviet Union".
• Russian Guy Suffers Most:
  • They're a Russian-speaking Belarusian band, and their music is bleak. Not for nothing are they often referred to as invoked"doomer music".
  • "Toska" takes its name from the Russian meaning/perception of misery as once exemplified by Anton Chekhov in a short story.
• Survival Mantra: Another, more positive interpretation of the above lyrics.
• The Unblinking: The woman of the music video of "Toska" stares at the camera and very rarely blinks.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: The miserable atmosphere of Post-Soviet Eastern Bloc states permeates all the imagery and themes of their music; however, based on their album covers' nightmarish presentation of old Soviet buildings, it's hard to argue they really present extant communist nations as utopian either.

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