From Russia, with song

Alina Simone's new CD is a tribute to 'Yanka,' an icon in her homeland

The first tipoff that Alina Simone's new album isn't your typical rock record comes 10 seconds into the first track. The jagged squall of guitars on "Half My Kingdom" seems normal enough for indie rock -- until a cinematic trumpet riff wafts in. And then another 10 seconds go by, and Simone begins to sing. In Russian.

In fact, there's not a word of English on Simone's "Everyone Is Crying Out to Me, Beware." Stark and dramatic, it's one of the most unusual albums in recent memory.

Simone is a part-time Triangle resident whose work has drawn frequent comparisons to Cat Power, P.J. Harvey and other women who rock emotionally. But she's never done anything as ambitious as "Beware," which she'll unveil Tuesday at a show in Chapel Hill.

"Beware" (54/40 or Fight Records) is a tribute album to "Yanka," the late Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva. A Soviet-era punk-rock legend who died in 1991, Yanka is virtually unknown to mainstream audiences outside Russia. Yet the music Yanka left behind was powerful enough to earn her a worldwide cult following.

"To me, Yanka's life story is very bound up in her music," Simone says. "It's incredibly striking, and also completely unique in Soviet-era rock music. She was the only woman really doing what people here would consider indie rock, setting an example I find compelling."

If Yanka's life and music are inextricably linked, you could say the same about the Russian-born Simone's life and this project. There was a time when Simone could not have imagined making a record like this one, which took her back to roots that she used to resist.

"When I was growing up, we respected Russian cultural heritage," she says. "But my parents were political refugees. So that was taboo."

Cold War childhood

Simone was born in the Ukraine in 1975, to dire circumstances because her parents were on the outs with the ruling Soviet regime. Her family immigrated to America when she was an infant.

Eventually, they settled in Massachusetts. Simone's father, Alexander Vilenkin, is a theoretical physicist at Tufts University and an acclaimed author (most notably 2006's "Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes").

While Simone was growing up, her family still spoke Russian around the house. But she had mixed feelings about her heritage.

"I grew up during the Reagan '80s, and I would liken being Russian in this country then to being Muslim after 9/11," Simone says. "Every night, the news basically said the Soviets wanted to nuke us.

"People would come up to me and say nasty things if they heard me speaking Russian to my grandmother, who spoke no English. Halloween one year, somebody wrote 'Commies Go Home' on our driveway with shaving cream."

Not surprisingly, Simone did her best to assimilate. She went by the Americanized first name Allie in high school and legally changed her last name to her mother's maiden name, Simone, when she married Joshua Knobe in 1999.

By her own admission, Simone showed little interest in her Russian heritage through her college years. She earned degrees in English and photography at Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. By her mid-20s, Simone was living in Austin, Texas, and doing volunteer work.

She also took her first steps into music then, mostly playing on street corners in Austin's busy Sixth Street nightclub district. But something was missing.

"It just struck me one day, 'I need to go back to Russia, learn Russian and find my family,' " she recalls.

She found a job in international development, which took her to Russia in 2001. In retrospect, Simone is surprised at her own nerve. Her Russian, which she had neglected for years, was shaky at best. Her first posting was in deepest Siberia.