photo by Matthew Spencer

Born in the Ukraine and raised in Boston suburbia, it wasn1t until she
landed in hot-ass Austin that Alina Simone found her voice in the doorway of an abandoned bar near the corner of 6th and Congress and began to sing. Fittingly, a facet of the content her raw, threadbare songs is about having epiphanies in the most ordinary of places.

Alina Simone performs songs from her forthcoming release, Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware, an inspired album of covers of the glasnost-era Siberian punk poet Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva. Known as Yanka, this remarkable songwriter, who had a yearning voice and favored rebellious lyrics, grew up in Novosibirsk, hooked up with the Siberian punk scene in 1985, and died mysteriously six years later, at the age of twenty-four. Simone has done a great service in bringing these treasures to non-Russian audiences. (Yanka’s recorded output included just twenty-nine original songs, all of which circulated on samizdat cassettes.) Simone’s innovative versions reveal her many similarities to her heroine—most prominently, her haunting voice. The greatest difference is in the presentation. Yanka’s sound was spare and gritty, driven mainly by her acoustic guitar. Simone’s arrangements are fleshed out with trumpet, viola, slide guitar, and bajo sexto. -The New Yorker

It's hard to remember a female pop vocalist (Cat Power? PJ Harvey?) who earned the ecstatic early accolades to match Alina Simone's. For this unmissable engagement—her last in the area before a long European tour—the sophisticated Ukraine-born singer-songwriter celebrates the music of Yanka Dyagileva, a likely suicide who was Russia's erstwhile answer to Patti Smith. - New York Magzine


" ...sensuous and captivating" - Venus

Video: Riot Act

Alina Simone | Polk039
Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware

Alina Simone | Polk032
Placelessness