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Guilty Pleasures
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The Beat, Guilty Pleasures >>
BY BOB TARTE
Cold weariness grips and twists Boris Kovac’s World After History (Piranha). The joy feel thin and nostalgic, while even the sorrows are muted, as if to shrug. "Well, what else did you expect from life?"
Given the in-your-face aggressiveness of popular music, tv shows und culture in general these days, reedman Kovac and bassist Milos Matic earn points for concocting ambitiously arranged pieces whose driving force is a lack of drive. But giving in to resignation isn't the same as formulating an alternative, Kovac epitomizes the album's ennui in his spoken-word vocal on 'To Entertain You." which sounds as if he's delivering its tongue-in-cheek lyric from a state of deep hypnosis. "We just want to make you happy." he claims, and the accompanying instrumentation barely hauls itself out of a chair. If this is happiness, it's surely the satisfaction of diminished expectations.
Kovac and company hail from Serbia, a nation not exactly known for instilling peaceful atmospheres. The underlying irony is so thick, it nearly scuttles the beauty of the clever if understated cabaret stylings that carry touches of chamber music here, und intimations of jazz there. Adding ambiguity in the guise of complexity, Kovac's band La Campanella plays a costumed role, sort of like a Balkanized version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. As on 2003’s Ballad at the End of Time, the conceit is that we're listening to a slightly bored, frequently inspired somewhat seedy orchestra on a Mediterranean cruise - one that presumably stops at ports of call whose glory days lie about 150 years in the past. To instill a holiday mood among the passengers, the band dips into a pastiche of popular music that bears tasty if overripe fruit.
Buttery-smooth soprano saxophone and accordion coat a slapstick ballroom rhythm on the emblematic "Limping Waltz." and when soaring solos dance above the ceiling, you can hardly look away. Even more lackadaisically ambitious is "Malena," which lurches from love poem to folk dance to Gypsy swing in just over five minutes. Talk about a crowd pleaser. It could melt the heart of the most hardened xenophobe, and bless us if we don't toe-tap along. Guilty pleasures abound through the lovely, languid disc, and if fascism and mayhem steal the best seats to the show, well, that's just Europe. That's just America, too. Don't blame the innocent cruise-ship band for the excesses taking place offstage. The guys are just trying to make a buck. 09/01/05
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