Gorazde – The Fury of Lullabies album review: Wrestling with Shadows

There is a certain allure to a dark aesthetic. Musically, it is a very malleable mood to set, as it can be used to both empower and overpower the listener. The Fury of Lullabies is an album that revels in this quality as Gorazde’s latest offering plays with the many moods of the heavy industrial music he plays with. The album feels like a descension at times, led by the first track of the album, Last Movement.

The deep, dark beat lights up with the shooting synths. The vocals creep up behind the noise, introducing a dark ambience that the track fully embraces. The track is backed up with a beat that’s easy to groove to and holds the track together as the wild synths shoot off explosive pops in front of wavy echoes. While the vocals never come to the forefront, the background style they adopt allows the performance to keep the mysterious and haunting aesthetic throughout the track. Last Movement sets a dark and shadowy mood for the album.

Kiss The Murderous Beak is a stand-out track that builds upon this mood by doubling down on it. The creeping synths leave a menacing impression as they chase you through the sounds of the wailing guitars during the intro. When you run into the vocal performance, it serves as a break from the anxious feeling the intro leaves you with. These vocals only build the sense of dread that the beat creates, with lines such as “impale the sun, only one way to die” delivering hauntingly beautiful motifs to an otherwise aggressive-feeling track, giving it a nice sense of depth. 

Incubavit is a hard industrial rock track that wastes no time making its heavy impression. The distorted guitars growl and wail atop strong percussion as the drums slam and cymbals crash, creating a groove that’s equally haunting as it is alluring. The track has one of the strongest vocal performances on the album, with lines such as “pain is all but over” being delivered with the authority to grab your attention before fading mysteriously in and out of the instrumentals. It’s a stand-out track that shows the heavier side of the album in full display.

Beholden is another noteworthy track to show off the robust nature of the dark mood of the album. The deep bass is contemplative as it leads you in before the industrial synths creep in to give it a pleasant sludginess. The contemplative groove quickly evolves into a head-swaying one as the guitar begins to wail, which takes on a strange bluesy aesthetic. This is reflected in the pronounced vocal performance on this track, which is felt when you hear lines such as “when your protection pleads survival, your promise compares to none.” It makes Beholden a stand-out track that feels fun in the face of both its own lyrics and the rest of the album.

The Fury of Lullabies is a heavy industrial tour de force. Gorazde takes familiar genre themes and twists or takes them to the next level. Tracks such as Kiss The Murderous Beak create a profound sense of instrumental anxiety with the menace the synths invoke, while others such as Beholden take a more loose approach to the genre. While it can lose itself within its own aesthetics at times and is definitely not for everybody, The Fury of Lullabies proves to be a great listening experience, both as a whole and when taken track-by-track.

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