The Night Swiper - Miles for Melania (album trailer)

What if an Armenian Jew from Moscow sings country covers of touching and unobvious pop hits? The Night Swiper is an English-language side project of Narek Arutyunyants (Vas’), a singer/songwriter from Russia. The debut LP “Miles for Melania”, released in 2020, brought together a meaningful compilation from reiterations of tireless classics, as if mixed into a soundtrack to a nostalgic road movie. The carefree “Country Roads” of John Denver, with the charming female vocals of a popular Russian indie singer Yana Blinder, sits alongside Leonard Cohen's reimagined retro-waltz “Chelsea Hotel #2”, and Elliott Smith's jazz-noir version of “Between the Bars” is followed by a cover of Crowded House’s “Fall at Your Feet”, suddenly referencing Johnny Cash. In the words of Russian music journalist Artyom Lipatov in the column for Salon AUDIO VIDEO magazine, “Narek and his musicians create their own space which is surely far more Americana than Country – this is soft, tender and very gentle music to the listener, сozy music, at the same time very masculine, very mature”.