Russia's Poetic Rockers

The prolific Russian rock band Splean has something for everyone: a down-to-earth demeanor and simple themes to suit the unpretentious, but just enough quirkiness and erudition to satisfy alternative and intellectual types. While they have carved out a niche for themselves as Russian rock mainstays, they also have a worldly side, having toured continental Europe, Britain and the United States. They manage to fill stadiums yet still play smallish clubs regularly.

Indeed, after stadium-sized concerts at Luzhniki in Moscow and BKZ Oktyabrsky in St. Petersburg, the band's next appearances are a pair of intimate club gigs on Friday and Saturday at Ikra.

"Clubs are closer to my heart," Splean's frontman and songwriter Alexander Vasilyev said in an e-mail interview Monday.

Vasilyev, 37, is a native son of St. Petersburg. His father was an engineer and his mother taught Russian literature. He spent a few years of his childhood in Sierra Leone and Lithuania, where his father was sent on work assignments, before returning to Leningrad in 1980. Two years later, Vasilyev's parents transferred him to a mathematics-oriented school, where his previously outstanding academic performance started to slip and he learned to play guitar.

In the late '80s, while attending the Leningrad Avionics Institute, he met Alexander "Morris" Morozov, who would become Splean's first bass player. The two started recording at Morozov's rudimentary home studio as a band called Mitra. After serving in the Soviet army from 1988 to 1990, where he composed some songs that ended up on the first Splean record, "Dusty Tale," Vasilyev entered the Leningrad State Institute of Theater Arts, Cinema and Music (now the St. Petersburg Theater Arts Academy) to study theater business management. He worked at theaters as a stagehand to make ends meet.

Looking back at those years, Vasilyev said he was struggling to find himself and to figure out what he really wanted to do in life.

"It was the ordinary flailing around of a young man," he said. "I didn't set out to be a musician."

In 1993, Vasilyev met keyboardist Nikolai Rostovsky. Vasilyev, Morozov and Rostovsky formed Splean the following year. The band took its name from an archaic, literary meaning of the word "spleen," with one letter changed when rendered in Latin letters.

"In due course, the Beatles changed one letter in the word 'beetle.' As you know, it turned out well," Vasilyev said. "The word 'spleen' is flat. 'Splean' seems to me to be multi-dimensional."

Over the years, Splean have experimented with changing musical genres and adjusting their playing styles from album to album. They have also undergone a few slight lineup changes. Their newer albums sound almost nothing like the first ones -- an evolution that Vasilyev described as "searching, searching, searching."

The mundane and the profound exist in more or less equal measure in Splean's music and lyrics, sometimes even in the same song. The song "New People," ostensibly about people having sex and making babies, has a deeper meaning, too: Halfway through, it seems to turn into a commentary on Russian fatalism and lack of regard for the sanctity of human life. Vasilyev sings, "People in Leningrad and Rome / Think death is that which happens to other people. ... / But no matter, no matter. They'll lament and forget / In time, new people will appear."

Released on the 2003 album of the same name, "New People" was written at a time when Vasilyev and his wife were thinking about having children. They finally had a son last September.

Splean's latest album, "Split Personality," came out last month. It has something of a literary flavor, with its name inspired by Sasha Sokolov's 1976 book "A School for Fools." It contains 17 diverse tracks, from short, punchy numbers such as "Celebration" to longer, lyrical ones such as "Mayak," which is Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "Instead of a Letter" set to music.

Vasilyev has set poetry to music before. Past efforts have included a song based on poetry by Alexander Blok and, in fact, Vasilyev's very first song, which was adapted from verse by the late poet Nika Turbina. The bookish elements in Vasilyev's lyrics are probably no accident, since he grew up in a literary-minded social milieu in Leningrad.

Perhaps that's why one of his fans is Victor Pelevin. The internationally acclaimed Russian writer has been quoted as saying, "The demons of Petersburg speak through him, as they did before through [Andrei] Bely and Blok."

Splean plays Fri. and Sat. at 9 p.m. at Ikra, located at 8A Ulitsa Kazakova. Metro Kurskaya. Tel. 262-4482.