Gruzja - Koniec Wakacji
"The band will self-release the album. Greed is the reason behind this decision."
The latest entry into Polish band Gruzja’s discography, Koniec Wakacji, takes all the zany sounds introduced prior, turns each up to eleven, breaks off the knobs, and throws them at you while cackling maniacally.
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Gruzja is a strange band. Every element of their visage is dripping in sarcasm and cheeky self-awareness. I’ve repeatedly seen them described as Australian immigrants (as far as I can tell, they’re not), and it’s not uncommon to see Polish fans trolling in discussion threads. For example, there exists a reddit thread where all the comments in English appear benign enough, but all the Polish comments are speaking ill of the band, including the user who posted their track. Occasionally, a reference to drinking in the bathtub is made.
Take their own description of their album as a demonstration of their aloof attitude.
The third album from Gruzja, entitled “Koniec Wakacji” will be released on 6th October and will be an illogical continuation of the band’s career so far. Guests include LARMO, Mold, Perturbator and unknown people. The author of the graphic design is Zbigniew Bielak. Satanic Audio is responsible for mixing and mastering. The material was recorded at MAQ Records and in The Basement. The band will self-release the album. Greed is the reason behind this decision. The album will be available in CD and digital formats.
"Koniec Wakacji" can be compared to a history book and a daily news bulletin - it doesn't offer anything new. It's a collection of fragments. Fresh and cold, strange and personal. It’s charades in a trench, and a trench in a smartphone. Faces tuned and disarmed. Everything fake and not pretended.
Given their own apocryphal statements and the required context of the regionally specific topics they address, a lot of their message falls flat on outsiders. Even their name (pronounced Ga-ROO-zee-ah) seems like a contentious inside joke privy only to Russia’s neighbors.
Gruzja is the name used by Slavic-speaking nations, including Poland, for the country Georgia - a name that the Georgian government had once implored its allies to not use, as it alludes to their time within the Eastern Bloc. The government’s request went as far as to assert that this name is proliferated intentionally by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in an attempt to prop up the Soviet legacy across the former Eastern Bloc, as well as to undercut the independence that Georgia has struggled to keep since the Russo-Georgian War in 2008. The five-day campaign is considered to be the first overt military action taken by the Russian Federation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, where Georgia first gained its independence.
Unfortunately for the goals of the Georgian government, when a word is so deeply entrenched in the vernacular of everyday people, there’s little that can be done to dislodge it, even if it had been brought about by nefarious state actors. While it’s not clear to me whether Gruzja is deliberately poking at Georgians, alluding to the modern significance of Georgia, or something else altogether, it at least appears that the Streisand effect is in play here. It seems unlikely that Gruzja would have ever taken on the name without knowing the baggage carried with it.
So what of the music?
Within seconds of starting the album, Jerusalem Shore washes over you with a relentless fervor, abound in blast beats and high-octane hardcore riffs. With the album having released five days before the resurgence of violence between Hamas and Israel, the desperate scream of “niech stanie się nic; proszę niech stanie” (“let nothing happen; please let it stand”) carries with it a gut-wrench unlike any other.
While most of the lyrics are layered with references that I doubt I could make sense of without the help of a Pole - such as those to Italian week at the German supermarket chain Lidl or the modern Polish poet Karol Samsel - the music itself is no less iconoclastic than the band’s themes. A very rebellious attitude is immediately invoked by the zany vocal delivery layered over spastic guitar riffs, rapid-fire drumming, and dissonant synth, all of which seem heavily inspired by hardcore, crust punk, and post-punk. The vocal embellishments on top of it all grow more unhinged and wacky as the album progresses, so even in the absence of meaning, it’s still easy to enjoy the lyrical delivery.
A bigger theme emerges after half-an-hour of intense riffage permeated with noisy electronic sections. The industrial, post-punk, and new wave shenanigans that ramp up halfway through the album only serve to further the often clown-like aesthetic that Gruzja weaves amidst their moments of overbearing power, ultimately capping off the album with a remix by the French darkwave DJ extraordinaire, Perturbator.
Before its resolution, the ride climaxes at the title-track Koniec Wakacji, loosely translated as “the end of the holiday” or “the end of summer” (i.e. “back to school”). The opening of the track shouts in a call-and-response with children - “Hey! Who’s Georgian?” (“Hey!”) - that ends in the violent twist of “Hands up! Head on the table! Altogether into a fresh hole.”
If the implication of kids in a mass grave doesn’t unsettle you enough, the next line brings home their point, as ominous as it is playful:
“Na zielonej Ukrainie, słodka krew z arbuzów płynie.”
“In green Ukraine, sweet blood flows from watermelons.”
Upon this hook, the theme woven into the album’s title becomes apparent, and the threat looming over the people of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Levant rings clearly through the otherwise jovial energy on the surface. For some, it is a threat realized, and their neighbors are now stuck biding time, wondering what’s next. Gruzja’s prior LP (not counting the Priest Simulator OST) was comically dubbed Jeszcze nie mamy na was pomysłu, or “We don’t have any ideas for you yet”. With this album, it certainly seems like they’ve found an idea, and they deliver it with music so hard-hitting, the message crosses the once convenient gap wrought by differences in language and locality.
The end of summer indeed. Bravo, Gruzja.