Kolya

When I first heard Kolya, they were a addiction. I have never heard such an odd band play such a way they play. While Kolya may have the same concepts of spoken word such as the later Moss Icon, The Van Pelt, Native Nod and Slint Kolya is able to still be completely different than from those. Kolya has its own signature style with instruments and even the tone of the spoken words and even the lyrics themselves. The band sounds like energy glowing and keeps building up slowly, it mixes post hardcore/math rock (especially on the bands song Iditarod)/emo. Even at this day Kolya can easily be one of my favorite picks, although not my favorite band. The band was able to put out 2 7"s and a LP which has a few songs similar to the 7"s and others that have more singing involved. Now that doesn't mean its a bad thing but those 7"s are more memorable when it comes down to Kolya. In recent years a rehearsal demo tape appeared in a couple of blogspots the tape was after the Iditarod 7" which still had 2 guitarists, during Kolya's early stages as a band the band was a 4 piece only to note that the bands second 7" has one which is our one and only Todd who also does the vocals. The demo tape has early versions of the 2 songs off the second 7" only that it appears to have 2 guitarists playing.. Both versions are incredible and I can't come up with any reason saying one is better than the other. But it also has 3 songs that I have never heard when I first discovered this band that being 2 instrumental songs and one very odd and possibly the darkest Kolya song entitled "Jet Lagged" while at my college campus I had kill time by going to the library and writing out the lyrics to this song (about 90% I got done) the song still clearly makes no sense but the tone is so mysterious and dark it makes you wonder. There were no physical copies of this demo since it was just some rehearsal of some sort.
These 7"s took me years to find and luckily I ran into 2 near mint condition copies being sold for 25 bucks each from the same discogs seller, these are very very rare to run into due to the very extreme quantity of these. I am not sure how many were pressed but hell i couldn't find these anywhere and even now.

Iditarod 7"
This is the bands first two songs which has 2 guitarists, the songs have a mathy side especially on the song Iditarod. Both songs are equally good and they are good impression newcomers as the very first bands 7" this is also One week records first and only release by the label. The sleeve on this looks pretty neat, the lyrics to Still life with candle are pretty long but they fit on the sleeve. Some odd reason there is a deer. Not bad actually.

The tone tells the story/Conversations and smoke screens 7"
I remember playing this one a lot when I heard them, the same night I discovered them sometime in late October where my parents and I went to a family birthday somewhere deep in LA since I had picked up a couple of new bands like Kolya, I gave this one a listen first. I quickly fell in love with it yet my 16 year old brain at the time wasn't familiar with such music like this. Perhaps the bass makes up for the other missing guitar from the original recording in '99.
1999 Demo Tape
I believe I mentioned that this tape wasn't discovered until sometime in early 2012, I am not sure if the band themselves ripped the tape or if someone else did but thank you to whoever did it. You see these songs weren't on the internet when I discovered Kolya. It was the 2 7"s and the amazing LP they did on Caulfield. The songs are rehearsals of what later happened to be in Kolya's second 7" (or at least 2 of the songs) The other 3 "Cutting apparatus" and "An encounter with logic" are both instrumental while Jet lagged is one that could have made it into Kolya's second 7" and possibly turned into a 10" instead with Jet lagged being on side B. Well I wasn't gonna post this but since I fixed those tiny glitches might as well. In the end we really need more motivating bands like Kolya especially now, hell even I started my own Kolya-esque project on my own about a year ago which you can hear it here