Year: 2025
Label: Zoharum
This is an intolerable album. No beating around the bush: I don’t like this album. It annoys and irritates me. It’s a frustrating listen.
But it’s an album that won’t let you be. It’s an album that demands attention. And, considering the subject matter, perhaps this is exactly what the album should be like.
According to the promo sheet, Polish Łubin avoid picking sides when it comes to the decades long conflict at the very centre of the album – but at the same time, and I quote, “with deep concern and anger looks at the effects of military and political actions that led to the unprecedented destruction of Gaza.“ Further, it looks with “deep disgust at the scale of destruction.”
My interpretation is that Gaza – the album – does not concern itself with political justifications and historical reasons for the conflict between Palestine and Israel. Instead, it looks at the current stage of the conflict – the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza – with disgust, disapproval and deep concern.
Provided my reading is even halfway correct – sentiments that are incredibly easy to concur with.
Musically, Łubin’s Gaza is even deceptively simple. Repetitive, simplistic electronic drum beats with minimalistic synth layers laid over them. The latter range from simple harmonious layers of ambience to looping, static bass patterns to various entirely atonal electronic effects. The looping nature of the music makes for some pretty grating listening at times.
Purely production wise, Jabalya with its percussion sounding like the rattling of machine gun fire and artillery is actually pretty genius. Other than that, the compositions feel pretty throwaway to me.
Overlaid on these are copious amounts of samples: the voices of rioting crowds, news broadcasts, people arguing, the thunder of armed conflict and genocide, singing, speaking, and so on. Especially some of the spoken word samples, looped in equally short excerpts as the music, become extremely grating and aggravating in no time. At the same time, these bring the subject matter to the front.
This is what makes Gaza impossible to ignore. The voices rising from the static drone of the repetitive percussive music refuse to become relegated to background listening. They are a demanding presence standing at the forefront.
From the honestly fucking intolerable shrieking lady in Raw Power to the dejected, disbelieving statement of a news broadcaster or some such on aforementioned Jabalya: “Everybody, look what they did”, to the news broadcast description of the assault on Al-Shifa hospital on Al-Szifa, the voices jar in the listener’s mind.
Gaza is an album that refuses to be ignored.
And that’s how it should be. Genocide is not something that should be easy to shrug off, to just switch the channel and forget about. The condemnable, deplorable actions of the Israeli government, its crimes against humanity, and the weak reactions, the implicit acceptance of the Israeli government’s actions in the west, are not things that should be easy to look away from.
And despite how much I don’t like the music on Gaza, this is what the album successfully does. It confronts the listener with the horrible reality of the genocide in a musical guise that succesfully avoids being preachy or taking untenable moral high grounds. It’s like an accusing finger at the complacency and non-committal apathy of the west. It’s a voice of consternation and righteous anger: look at what they’re doing.
Only Death Is Real 