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Culture: Reviews
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Outpost Magazine, Culture: Reviews >>
While the boisterous Balkan brass band sound may provide a common starting point for many musicians from the former Yugoslavia, they are often nuanced by cultural influences specific to their region.
Take Boris Kovac. Hailing from the Vojvodina region, where the Mediterranean influence is more pronounced, Kovac has incorporated the Spanish guitar of fla menco and other music from around the Mediterranean coast.
To that base his quintet adds its own particularly doom-laden, cabaret- friendly style, forging a quiet, reflective melancholy that runs throughout the album. This isn't music for a raucous it's better suited to a memorial service. The title World After History, (he also plays with La Danz Apocalypsa Balcanica, who put out an album called Ballads at the End of Time) isn't just a casual choice.
A song such as the partially ironic "To Entertain You," one of the few with vocals, might well be taken not just from a cabaret, but literally from Cabaret, the similarly elegiac film musical. Kovac's impossibly deep voice " We would like to entertain you... At the end of At the end of At the end of misery/ At the end of history."
This is beautiful music, but it's also quietly emotional music that makes the listener reflect on what used to be and marvel that out of such doom and nightmares, such gorgeous creativity can emerge. 10/01/05
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