Although many people find them controversial and not what they were in their beginings, I found the phenomenon of BRKOVI fascinating.  This band comes from Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia and they fill all the big halls and stadiums of the region meaning Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Slovenia. Everything they did was diy and without a label or some strong hand to back them up. This is their new studio album and I listened and reviewed it for this webzine.

The members of Brkovi are the veterans of Croatian underground punk and hardcore scene baking their experience in many bands prior to this one. Brkovi were formed, as the guys say, to mix their love for punkrock, some metal and folk music. The band is very tight and musically one of the tightest  bands in the Croatian scene. Some may like their style with unique sense of humour in the lyrics, auto irony and the lyrics touch everything that is primitive and mindless in some people but are done with a nice line of sarcasm. Some don´t like them and claim that they became what they laughed about in their songs in the earlier days. They remind of the old Yugoslav band Nervozni poštar, but in my opinion Brkovi are better. I find their first two albums awesome. Then they had some great songs on their records and some were awful. Fortunately this album has more great than terrible songs. There are 11 songs in total, with lyrics in Croatian or some hybrid of Yugoslav Croato/Serbian lyrics. There are some excellent songs like “Grad” or “Lenta” and “Odlazim” but there are some terrible kinda folk songs like “Ljubavni rat” that I just couldn´t swallow. The singer Shamso 69 sings better and better with every new album, being more melodic and less folkish apart from some excursions into total folk waters. This is not an excellent album, but it is a decent more punkrock album than folk stuff.

7/10

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http://www.brkovi.com/