Maneuvering between grandiose retro motifs and a surprising sincerity, Michelle Gurevich’s songs are tragicomic, melody-driven, sentimental and suspended in shadowy glamour. She combines humour with dark realism in smoky and intimate ballads delivered with cutting and fatalistic lyrics.
The daughter of a Kirov ballerina from Odessa and an engineer from Leningrad, Michelle grew up listening to her parents’ collection of Soviet and 70’s European records. Decadent, dramatic and earnest, vintage keyboards and synth strings offer the solitary rendition of a grand experience, and a voice always upfront delivers motifs familiar yet impossible to pinpoint from the great soup of European chanson.
With shows regularly selling out in cities like Istanbul, Berlin, Warsaw and Athens, Michelle has established a niche that includes the East European diaspora, the Berlin queer scene, and those with a taste for the melodramatic balladry of Charles Aznavour, Zeki Müren and Nikolai Slichenko.
While her concerts include more live aspects and a line-up of musicians, she continues to produce music in her bedroom, maintaining an intimacy and singleness of expression – from her bedroom to yours. A genre based partly on elements of melody and style, but moreso, a signature fatalist-celebratory approach to songwriting.
