Customer Reviews

Yugoslavia

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"Yugoslavia" is a hauntingly beautiful addition to the Tonio K catalog. I'm a fan of his late 80's work ("lost civilization..."), and this album revives a lot of the same tone and feeling. My favorite tracks, (Practically Invisible (!!!), I Know A Place) reveal a solemn introspection and spiritual tenderness that you don't often hear in pop music. This is good stuff! If you appreciate thoughtful, tenderly delivered music, with serious thematic content, you'll love the album.

Unfortunately, a lot of current Tonio K fans discovered him only after his mid 80s foray in to CCM and didn't know his blistering earlier work, nor that he has continued to turn out the music at a steady clip over the years since then.

Yugoslavia is a wonderful core sample of the music he has made post-CCM. Though the production is nowhere near the same quality as that of T Bone Burnett on Romeo Unchained, it holds up nicely under its own weight. The production isn't slick, nor overbearing... maybe the production is simply adequate. This isn't a bad thing, however, because removing the slickness allows the real content of the music to come to the surface and, as always, the real content of Tonio K's work is the lyric.

This album is a nice collection of songs that feel as though the writer knew in advance that the total number of people ever to hear them would be small... and simultaneously it appears that this didn't bother him. He wasn't writing for the masses to begin with. These songs feel very much as if he were writing for himself - for his own pleasure - and if you get to enjoy the songs too at a later date, well, all the more better.

Don't expect this collection of tunes to feel at all like his early work, nor like Romeo Unchained. Yugoslavia stands by itself. Very listenable, very enjoyable, not as erudite as the critics pointed out years ago, but still passionate.

I picked up Tonio K in his foray to CCM "Notes from the Lost Civilization" and he's one of my favorite artists.

Bouncing from tired cynicism to tender naivete the album seems more contemporary now than when it was released. Too subtle for CCM or the top 40. This is the music you crank up to listen to the lyrics, not to rattle the windows.