From Skopje With Love

This is an album whose appeal grows with repeated plays. Like many artists from the Balkans, vocalist Elena Hristova's first musical encounters were Western. Only with maturity came an interest in locally inflected sounds. These nine new seductive tracks all in some way have to do with Skopje, the hometown of Hristova, whose childhood memories and poetic impressions of the city are evoked here in a way that is perceptible even to someone who doesn't understand Macedonian. The blend of local Oriental traditions with an unabashed pop sensibility and Western indie sounds succeeds remarkably well. All of the songs are creations of a sometimes strange, but always beguiling, synthesis of East and West. Western influences can be read in the dark and brooding Gothic basslines of ‘Feniks’ or ‘Kej’, the rocking sax of ‘Via Egnatia’ or the industrial noise in ‘Cesma’. All of this exists contiguously with certain local instrumental elements, most strikingly the subtle kanun, which hovers hauntingly in the background in many of the tracks, or the warm and poignant clarinet phrases which colour a lot of the songs. In the end, like the city of Skopje itself, East and West exist in harmony, with no one side gaining the upper hand.