Label: Godz of War Productions
Release date: January 31st, 2025
Another review and one more Polish young ensemble I got to know thanks to my old buddy who’s boss of Godz of War Productions. Garota was found during the pandemic in 2020 in Szczecin. But musicians who play in this trio are more experienced than you can think. I’ll not list here names of bands they played before. There are few reasons for such a decision. One of them, and the most important in my opinion, is: you should check it out by yourselves – sorry I ”force” you to do it, but I think listening to metal needs some sacrifices and activity. By the way, all of them create more or ess similar music, they represent the same sub-genre of our beloved music.
”Z Mieczem…” is, just like in cases of Toughness and Frightful, second full-length of the band. Also here we had to wait for quite a long time – a little more than two years. It contains seven songs of music you can quite easily guess by taking a look at artwork and even logos. Anyway, I noticed it became a popular thing between hodes creating such sounds to use Polish words as its names and write Polish lyrics. Well, actually in other countries there’s the same trend, as I know. Music itself isn’t of course too complicated, even if it happens quite a lot in this field. But guys follow rules of the genre and it means the only important thing here is to create an unholy, dark and blasphemous atmosphere, to worship devil, death and other disgusting stuff and not to show technical skills and so on. Well, Garota in their lyrics is more about philosophical aspects of for example death. That’s why they’re quite deep and, at least in some cases, even a little like poetry. Of course I don’t want to analyze them here and tell you about their quality. I know, texts in music like that are very important and even an immanent part of creativity. But at the same time I don’t give you my interpretation and say ”this is the only right one”. That’s not me! Anyway, the lyrical side harmonizes with the purely music one in my opinion.
As I said before, Garota’s creativity isn’t something complicated as hell, actually it’s quite easy both to compose and play, but at the same time you absolutely can’t call it “primitive” – even if this word in describing such music sounds more like a compliment than something pejorative. Everything of course is based on few chords and seemingly uncomplicated drumming, but even me who’s not listening to just this genre of metal habitually or even very often, know that’s, let’s call it, the hallmark of such work. At the same time, like I said before, even an experienced ear will recognize inhabitants of Szczecin know what their instruments are and can use it very well. Vocal mostly is of course typic screechy growling.
Well, now I think everyone knows extremely well what kind of metal Garota plays and I don’t even need, even if I probably should do it, to write these two words. There are some influences of other genres like thrash and other ones, but they’re very delicate in my opinion. Anyway, just like it happens quite often to me when I listen to such music, I like and appreciate this released January 31st by the aforementioned label as a CD and digital album more and more. That’s perhaps not something I’ll come back to every week or even month, but it’s always a pleasure to hear something like that. I recommend ”Z Mieczem…” especially to people who love the sub-genre of our beloved music I’m writing about, even if I never named it – but all of you know what I’m talking about, so it’d be just an unnecessary thing to do in my opinion. But this is a thing also for people like me who listen to it from time to time only. And it’s definitely worth spending some Euros on it. By the way, there’s also a cassette version released the same day by Sign of Evil Productions.
