The drums are dashing forward as the bassline pulls everything in the master mix back, but as the different channels within “Summer Bliss, Feature Mist” are pulled in every direction, Gorazde’s melodic war starts to sound rather harmonious and justifiably filled with rage. In the new record The Fury of Lullabies, Gorazde take a look at the “notion of shadow archetypes and their assimilation into conscious reality,” as they put it in their own words, and taking just one look at songs like “Summer Bliss, Feature Mist,” “Beholden,” “Diadem,” or “Until the Stars Bleed” will demonstrate how far they were willing to go to make theirs a complete narrative.
BANDCAMP: https://gorazde.bandcamp.com/album/the-fury-of-lullabies
The gods of noise are summoned immediately in the opening cut “Last Movement” as though their presence in this record was more than necessary, and when the synths swell and the strings clash with their searing melodic output, it’s hard for even the most discriminating of listeners to pull away from their speakers. The Fury of Lullabies has a lot of moxie for being an ultra-dark, deathrock-style offering, and if you’re a fan of Nick Cave revivals, it might just be the best record out this season.
“Dead Hand Path” blends doom metal and industrial rock together in a sexy fashion, putting more stock in the grinding of the percussion than it does a robotic or rigid verse, and much like the smothering “Postulant,” it doesn’t extinguish tonal sharpness just for the sake of making a melody more accessible. Honestly, preserving melodic integrity never seems like a priority for this crew in songs like “Kiss the Murderous Beak” and “Luminaries,” but I don’t see why this has to be a bad thing at all (especially given the emotional subtext it produces in the lyrics here).
The instrumental “Enucleate the Third Eye” has a richness to its sound that would have been absent were it varnished with a lot of studio bells and whistles, and really the same could be said of “Until the Star Bleed” and “Orison” as well. Some LPs cannot stand the glisten of polish, and in this instance, The Fury of Lullabies likely wouldn’t be the juggernaut it is were it given anything other than a rough and tumble DIY finish.
DOWNLOAD LINK: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/gorazde/projections
If big beats are your thing, the rather swing-happy “Incubavit” might be more your speed than the meditative “Distant Spirits” is, but the best thing about this highly experimental piece from Gorazde is that we aren’t working with one recurring tempo from one song to the next. There’s plenty of droning inserted in this tracklist for good measure, but the psychologically provocative structure of the most powerful songs here tends to center more on a volatility in the rhythm rather than a stoic groove. After repeat listens, I’ve found that there really is something for every discriminating deathrock and dark ambient fan’s taste in The Fury of Lullabies, and if you haven’t already spent an evening alone in the dark with its tracklist, you have no idea what you’ve been missing.
Kim Muncie