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Written in fRoots issue 357, March 2013


BRINA
Slecena Koza
Drugod DRUGOD CD015 (2011)

This new one from Slovenia’s Brina Vogelnik with her quintet is a bigger, lusher production than ever before. Pretty commercial, in fact, but not in a bad way, just intelligently-made music likely, or at least deserving, to gain quite wide listenership (but what do I know about the listening preferences of the Slovenian public?).
      Brina’s singing has her characteristic light, poised warmness, largely close-up and intimate as the arrangements sensitively and ingeniously envelope her. It’s the kind of clear, rich, well-produced roots-influenced chanson one hears among, for example, Norwegian women singer-songwriters.
      The music, as on her earlier albums, is still largely founded on traditional lyrics, themes and melodies, plus a good deal of original composition, but because of the non-folksiness of the arrangements to a non-Slovenian speaker that’s not immediately apparent as it moves through a catchy articulacy of means of expression including massed show-choruses, tango-like accordion breaks, walking-bass limpid piano, reflective ethereality, slide guitar, sultry midnight-music, sophisticated rhythm-section work, and passionate, keening violin (the latter from Jelena Zdrale, over whose bare back on the reverse of the pack the track titles are superimposed; the album’s title, from a Brina composition, means “Skin Stripped Off”).

      www.drugagodba.si


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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