- Courtesy the artist
- Okean Elzy, with front man Svyatoslav Vakarchuk second from right
I won’t put on airs: I can’t speak or read a word of Ukrainian. And I’d never heard of Okean Elzy (“Elza’s Ocean”) till I got a press release last month alerting me to their show on Sunday at the Riviera Theatre. The subject line of that e-mail referred to this group from Lviv simply as “Top Ukrainian band,” which hardly seized my imagination. It’s not even phrased properly to work as a hyperbole! But after a bit of research, I’m pretty confident that Okean Elzy are in fact the most popular rock band in Ukraine—which all but guarantees them a large, ecstatic audience in Chicago.
A headstrong but melancholy rock ballad, “Ya Na Nebi Buv” reminds me at times of something a Slavic Dire Straits might’ve done in the early 80s. It seems like a very easy song to get sentimental about—its combination of wistfulness and resignation (with the caveat that I don’t know the lyrics) reminds me of the feeling I get reading Chekhov. (I happen to be in the middle of a collection of his short stories this week, and I just finished “The Kiss,” so that’s not as pretentious as it sounds.)
