Friday 9 February 2018

Korni Grupa - 1941 (1979)


The third and final album from this Yugoslav band.

Korni Grupa was a quintet on this album with a lineup of keyboards, bass, drums, guitars and vocals.
They had help from the local vocalist hero Josipa Lisac.

Korni Grupa was a good band from a now gone country. A country constructed by the big powers and destroyed in a very, very nasty civil war in the 1990s.

Yugoslavia had some good prog, folk and jazz bands though and I have lined up some more bands for reviews in the coming years. Korni Grupa has stirred my inbuilt curiosity.

I have reviewed their two previous albums for this blog and you can find the reviews somewhere else in this blog. Two interesting albums.

1941 was a year when Yugoslavia was invaded and brutally repressed by Nazi-Germany, well helped by the internal conflicts within Yugoslavia where old scores was being settled. A poet wrote a poem and this was made into a TV series. Korni Grupa provided the soundtrack...... which is what I am reviewing here.

Two long tracks and I had my grave doubts before I started to listen to this album. Well, I got a surprise.

The sound is a bit iffy as this album was recorded live in the studio. But the two long songs are greatly enhanced by the vocals from Josipa Lisac.

The songs are both heavy, brooding and very much in tune with the theme described over. This is war and suffering music. That also means some gloomy pastoral music too. There is lots of guitars and keyboards here on this half an hour long album.

The sound is not good and this album could had been a lot better if it was recorded in a normal way with takes and retakes. Nevertheless, this is not a bad album at all. It is somewhere between decent and good. It is a lot better than I thought it would be. This album deserves some attention.

2.5 points

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