Regular jewel case with clear transparent tray. Includes a 12-panel, double-sided, fold-out insert with artworks.
Following on from their 2016 critically acclaimed album “Księżyc Milczy Luty”, Polish nekrofolk act Furia have announced their next material. Entitled “W Śnialni” (which roughly translates to “the dream room”) the musical work, which draws comparisons to a musical drama in style, is released on 21 February 2021 via Pagan Records.
Furia is a band that fascinates me from different perspectives, in my review of ‘Huta Luna’ I talked about how me not being a polish speaker and their experimental approach to music gave them a surreal and dreamscape feeling that captivated me. In this review I could say exactly the same thing, but I think that here another characteristic emerges that Furia's music captures perfectly. For those who don't know, this Furia album contains the involvement of theatre actors and an orchestra, I have read the band themselves mention that their aim with this record was to combine their music with a radio style theatrical performance. So it would be normal to consider VITAL to understand what the actors are performing in order to enjoy this work, but here the beauty that is the music comes into play. Maybe understanding the narrative aspects of this play would help me to enjoy it more, but at no time do I need to understand what is happening to enjoy the music, and this is what really happens to me with ‘W śnialni’, and this is a pleasure that only an art like music can give me, I can watch a film in a language I don't know and appreciate many aspects of it, but I can't understand it in its totality, the same with a literary work in a language I don't know. But with music all I have to do is close my eyes and start to feel it.
And it's not that I just enjoy specific parts of the album or the instrumental segments, I like the way this record is constructed even if I can't understand all the parts. Furia had things clear in this work, the two songs that make up this album are of long duration and even though they have distinctly experimental traces, the idea is clearly one, and its construction is done in a certain way, so I consider absurd to think that there are ‘skippeables’ parts. I like what they propose and how they propose it, the slow cadence of the build up with which the track starts would not be as powerful if it wasn't for the first 4 minutes of drone, nor without the hysterical laughter of one of the actor performers, I like how they interrupt their music and give it shape within the piece as if the actors themselves were listening to it and the moment where two different recordings are intercalated, which happens more than once, everything is part of an intricate experiment where I feel that each piece is necessary to enjoy it in its totality.
The sound of the guitars is incredible, Furia is one of the black metal bands I know that puts more care into the sound of the guitars in each work, in this work the most mesmerazing moments are thanks to the tonality of the guitars, dancing between black and post metal with repetitive and psychedelic riffs that have an edge in their sound to noise rock. The album starts with pure drone and many of the subsequent sections of the record have that feel, extremely repetitive, but of a kind that doesn't get boring, all the sections are long but that allows them to settle in the listener's mind and memory, and when you get enraptured by the instrumentation you realise how much the track evolves, I could swear that track 1, ‘Wesele w śnialni’ is one of the shortest 16 minute tracks I've ever experienced. Track 2, ‘Tańcowały chochoły wyjawienie’ is much more derivative, it dives deeper into the dementia created by the actor's voices and the whole track feels like a perpetual build up to an agonising climax by a song that hasn't stopped evolving in his pace. Special and necessary mention to Namtar, who is slowly becoming one of my favourite drummers for his ability to lead this demented track to different cadences with an outstanding performance.
I can understand that not everyone can stand this, all those voices in the background, and sometimes in the spotlight, can be a turn off for many people, especially those who can't understand anything, the listening can be challenging and obtuse on many occasions, but it's all those elements what makes it have that experimental and unique nature, and that's what is so appealing, if Furia didn't do it that way it wouldn't be sincere, if it wasn't sincere it wouldn't be art, and if it wasn't art it couldn't break the language boundary. That's why it has to be that way.
Sample: youtube.com/watch?v=kqx_cZN9ag8
