Gurs Gerran Bizi Gara

Released
21st March 2024
Format

12 Inch

Black

£16.00

‘Llantos no nos dejan ver más adelante que los recuerdos, Tu nostalgia! Tu nostalgia! Tu nostalgia es pura frustración!’ (Derrota) ‘Crying does not allow us to see further ahead than memories, Your nostalgia! Your nostalgia! Your nostalgia is pure frustration!’ (Defeat)

Gurs hail from Bilbao and take their name from a French internment camp that was initially established to hold Republican combatants escaping from Spain following Franco’s fascist Nationalist victory in the civil war in 1939.  Gerran Bizi Gara (We Live In War) is their debut full-length and follow up to their excellent 2022 self-titled EP.

The band continue to successfully harness a potent combination of richly dense, melancholic post-punk and surging, bristling hardcore.  The guitars weave sinuously smouldering melodies to which the gruff shouted Basque / Spanish vocals and driving rhythm section provide a punchily aggressive counterpoint. The result is an album steeped in sonic drama, not least on the searing opener No Retorno (No Return), and an abundance of heart swelling group choruses, most notably, perhaps, on Volverán (They Will Return) and Derrota (Defeat).

Lyrically, Gurs deploy darkly poetic, and at times, rather more vehement imagery to explore the hollowing out of our lives on No Retorno and Eder Ta Hutse (Beautiful And Empty), as well as the consequences of social segregation in our cities on Volverán.  The title track and Derrota are calls to action in the face of political repression and misplaced notsalgia respectively, while the album closes with Anna, a raucous personal tribute.  An album that burns with a palpable sincerity.

—Foundation Vinyl