Gorazde “The Fury of Lullabies” (LP)

Embracing conventionality in any manner is essentially taking the easy way out in any genre these days, but few prove this notion true quite as emphatically as Gorazde does in The Fury of Lullabies. Comprised of noisy bastions of industrial and death rock in “Diadem,” “Incubavit,” “Dead Hand Path,” and “Kiss the Murderous Beak” whilst also nailing the perfect concept for melding drone metal and post-punk together in “Luminaries,” “Projections,” and “Orison,” Gorazde brings new meaning to the oft-used term ‘hybridity’ in this release, and for my money offer up what could be the heaviest indie-rock release of 2021 to date. The Fury of Lullabies is bluntly titled and lives up to every expectation its name would imply, and I can’t say that for every record I’ve been listening to recently.

BANDCAMP: https://gorazde.bandcamp.com/album/the-fury-of-lullabies

Sublime percussive elements lend a bit of foundational charisma to the mix in “Postulant,” “Enucleate the Third Eye,” and “Diadem,” but I don’t think the drums were ever meant to lock down the center stage in this record. Instead, their role is to frame the noise beside the lyrics as excellently and exquisitely as possible without using rhythm to dictate the mood of the music entirely, and if there’s ever been an example of how to pull something like this together without sounding indebted to digital technologies, it’s in The Fury of Lullabies. Contrast and conflict are closely related in the studio, but Gorazde is using both to their advantage here.

The Fury of Lullabies is a remarkably full-bodied effort from start to finish, to such an extent where I would say breaking up one-two punches like “Last Movement”/“Dead Hand Path,” “Distant Spirals”/“Enucleate the Third Eye,” or “Kiss the Murderous Beak”/“Until the Stars Bleed” would be to reshape the entire theme and story of this album as Gorazde intended for it to be interpreted. Call them a progressive act if you want, but no matter what kind of labeling this group gets I think their conceptualism stands out as one of the more seamlessly fitted attributes within their skillset period. They know how to write more than scattered chapters in an anthology; this is cohesive, gripping, and holds my attention from the first songs to the last moments of “Projections” at the end of the LP.

DOWNLOAD LINK: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/gorazde/projections

There’s really no other way for me to put it – The Fury of Lullabies is one of the most intriguing and provocatively unkempt alternative rock records I’ve heard in the past two years, and while it doesn’t check any mainstream boxes from what I can tell, I think it’s going to become a watershed release for this band’s ascent through the indie hierarchy in the 2020s. I was surprised at how listenable an LP this is for it being as far to the left of the typical pop effort as it is, but when it comes to making intricate music compelling, you can usually trust detail-oriented players like those in Gorazde to come through every time. They’ve yet to let me down, and I believe they’re going to get a lot of praise for what they’ve done in this third installment in their full-length discography.

Mark Druery