It's no coincidence that Emerson, Lake & Palmer once recorded a live album at Montreal's Olympic Stadium, that Roger Waters was inspired to write The Wall after a spit-soaked altercation with an overzealous fan at the same venue, and that the city is home to the world's most popular Genesis tribute band-- this town loves it some prog-rock. Perhaps it's because Montreal is the North American metropolis with the most pronounced European influence, but even local bands of metal (Voivod), Britpop (the Dears), electro-punk (Les Georges Leningrad), and populist-indie (Arcade Fire) origin have embraced the genre's narrative qualities, intricate musicality, and theatricality. Montreal's Yamantaka//Sonic Titan are the latest torch-bearers for the city's prog-and-proud tradition. But where the most renowned prog-rock bands have introduced thematic frameworks into their music very gradually over the course several years-- remember, even Rush started out writing three-minute pop crotch-rockers about wanting to get laid-- the conceptual scope and song-cycle composition heard on YT//ST is the result of refinement and focus.
To say the duo of Ruby Kato Attwood and Alaska B have lofty ambitions would be an understatement. Being of Anglo-Asian descent-- the former is Japanese-Scottish, the latter Chinese-Irish-- the two formed Yamantaka//Sonic Titan to address the duality of their cultural identities, as reflected in their band's double name, not to mention the tendency to appear in public sporting kabuki face paint and bikinis. Early shows were reportedly defined by decorative stage sets, performance art, homemade instruments made of trash and noisy experimentation, as the duo worked toward the goal of making its debut album a full-blown "noh-wave" rock opera, titled Star. Now that YT//ST have solidified into an eight-piece rock-band formation, they've issued this album as a 30-minute preview of that larger, still-in-progress work. But the record feels wholly substantial and satisfying in its own right, and even those with no prior knowledge of YT//ST's history and elaborate intentions can just enjoy it for what it is: volcanic prog-rock colored with equal parts post-punk urgency, stoner-metal heft, and psychedelic pop whimsy.
Thanks to smart, brisk sequencing, the seven disparate songs presented here hang together as a seamless piece, even if the thematic devices linking them aren't so easy to discern: The tribal-ceremonial scene setter "Queens" offers references to ravens, snakes, hounds, and Alejandro Jodorowsky's surrealist-horror classic The Holy Mountain, but it proves to be the only lyrically legible song on the album, as Ruby and Alaska become increasingly reliant on words of indeterminate language and ghostly harmonies. However, inscrutably titled songs like the funhouse-mirrored acid-pop of "Reverse Crystal//Murder of a Spider" and the space-age stomper "Hoshi Neko" nonetheless display an insidiously melodic quality that suggests Stereolab on steroids. And where these songs foreground YT//ST's eccentric side, the nightmarish, seven-minute colossus "A Star Over Pureland" showcases their command of brute physicality, pitting the ladies' echo-drenched shrieks against a relentless, jackhammered fuzz-metal assault, like Fly-era Yoko Ono waging war with Lightning Bolt. Yamantaka//Sonic Titan may still aspire to the sort of conceptual grandeur that requires an Olympic Stadium to contain it, but right now, what they're really good at is putting the "raw" in prog.
