Pressed on gold-colored disc. Regular jewel case with black tray. Includes a 12-page booklet with lyrics.
Furia is one of those bands that are always worth keeping on your radar, the musicians of this group always try to bring something special to the table and you can tell that they are only trying to please themselves, staying away from any trends or trying to play it safe to satisfy the fans. That, of course, causes that not all of their releases are always a dish of good taste, if we refer to some of their more recent proposals one will find a multitude of approaches, Nocel introduced in a clear and obvious way to some post-metal elements together with an urban and cold atmosphere, functional for the most part but without having much spark. Księżyc milczy luty was incredibly experimental in songwriting with labyrinthine compositions but by focusing too much on that the songs lost meaning and gave a sense of improvisation that didn't benefit the record as a whole. W śnialni had his own formula, using radiophonic elements and a vibrant guitar tone to, along with an almost drone-influenced repetition, create some truly mesmerising tracks. Well, Huta Luna is no less, it also has its own formula and style. It is undoubtedly the fastest album by the polish band, it is direct and at the same time incredibly minimalistic, it takes a path and doesn't deviate from it during the whole first half. At first, my response was lukewarm, I thought it was a genuinely good album but I couldn't find its personality, the idea behind the whole hour long musical process, I wasn't understanding what it wanted to represent, something quite strange for a Furia release. As time went on, I understood it more and more, this album stayed out of my top 10 favourites of last year and yet I found myself coming back to it often, with segments of it clearly in my head, and I started to appreciate a quality about this release that has always been in my head since the first time I listened to it but I couldn't quite see it quite clearly.
Furia is a band that has a large part of their fanbase from their own country, if any of you are reading this I hope you understand that, for me, everything related to this band and the polish language has a very exotic feel to it. Despite being a language with a latin alphabet, its slavic origin and its amount of diacritic characters makes me enter into an unsettling realm where I can read the words but they really sound and look like pure gibberish to me, giving it a surreal appearance. And this is what I was getting at, Huta Luna really does feel like the music from a dream.
There are many elements on this release that can radiate a dreamlike and abstract character, the guitars without going any further transmit a lot and bring a lot of content and personality to the work, you can appreciate a black metal riffing but with a nuance of its own, it sounds much cleaner than the classic tremolo picking, there is a greater sense of melody despite its speed and dark character, but still all this only gives more space and freedom for varied and charismatic guitar sounds. There are more precious melodies at times but they never conflict with the rest of the song, there are also several arpeggios that have a post rockish influenced sound and even guitar plucks with a united states western-like music flavour. All these licks coexist in the same sonic universe but although it would be preferable for them to feel cohesive, the truth is that they seem to be part of other songs, making the final result have that strange atmosphere, but the curious thing is that it really works.
The drums are one of the most outstanding parts of the album by far, pure blast beat to infinity, without pause without waiting for anyone, it completely sets the path of the album during the whole first half, it's a beastly, raw and very human performance and probably one of the best examples that blast beats are not only for untalented drummers. Namtar does a whole exhibition where he brings to life all those riffs and all those melodies that would feel very different without his input. With this in mind, it's a good time to say that from what I've read, all the guitar playing is based on polish folk songs, making this a sort of accelerated and brutal reinterpretation, reinforcing the idea of two worlds colliding musically, the close melodies and folk quality accompanied by a hellish percussion that ends up causing that haunting and surreal feeling that the album has.
The vocals and their delivery also help a lot to this effect, there are no shrierks here, most of them are gang shouts or spoken word, the few spots where the vocalist sings seem more like a poetic recitation. The lyrics are minimal, very repetitive and at times their delivery in the composition seems completely random, when you think you have found a pattern the members will change it, making the compositions more absurd and labyrinthine despite their minimalist elements. The song that best represents this is the fourth cut, "Wracaj", probably my favourite song from 2023 and the one that inspired me to write this review and all my comments about the album, as it is the one that best exemplifies everything this work represents.
If the whole first part of the album represents a strange dream where lots of things from our everyday life intermingle and create something meaningless, the final track "Księżyc, czyli Słońce" represents the awakening, an awakening among sweats, one where it is still night but where the first rays of dawn can be appreciated, where the dream is still very recent but little by little it starts to be forgotten in our reality. This ambient track is totally the opposite of everything Furia had done in the work so far, it keeps its minimalism but it is slow, subtle, somber, much closer to reality, there are moments where you can hear samples of nature sounds as background for licks of ambient or even noisy elements. Despite its slowness, the track doesn't stop advancing and developing, and when you want to realise it, there are several sections that have passed to get to the point where you are, sometimes it's a white and repetitive noise, other times it's a dense and heavy one, getting to be even oppressive. Approaching the end, you hear a distant chant, a tribal and melancholic one, an old and antique chant whose existence is longer than any of us. Slowly the chant approaches us, no, we approach the chant, we walk to it, through the undergrowth as our footsteps crunch in the soil, until the chant is no longer heard, and our journey ends.
This is all obviously very nice, but it's still a personal interpretation and it doesn't mean that I loved the album in all its facets, I find it fascinating, with a lot of potential and very artistic ( something I love), however not all that glitters is gold. The whole blast beats and minimalism thing works for the most part, but it's a mood you have to get into, it's very easy to get tired and monotonous at a certain point. But the biggest problem is the final track, which makes up almost half of the album. Although I try to make concessions about its artistic and symbolic value, the truth is that it hardly contributes anything, it is totally skippeable because, despite being 28 minutes long, it is incapable of creating anything, it doesn't reflect or represent anything in a concrete way, it is too slow and unmelodic to feel like an epic ambient track like "Atlus" from Spectral Lore and at no point does it manage to evoke something. It might have meaning and sense for the band and maybe it has something to do with polish folklore, but as I see it it just doesn't add anything.
Even so, I have a certain appreciation for this release, it seems to me one of the most unique and special works in the Furia catalogue, it has a lot to offer, of course it has some flaws, but most of its virtues are superior. That's why I'm a bit sad that it has gone more unnoticed than I would like, because I really believe that there are people who will find something very special here.
Sample: youtube.com/watch?v=CFSZvza0inc
