At this year's SXSW, I found myself with an unexpected hour of down-time in between bands I wanted to see. I wandered into the tiny bar Headhunters and happened to find a group of dudes executing impressive stereo hair-whips while bashing out an intricate, proggy form of crunch-metal-- not an uncommon sight at SXSW, or CMJ, or anywhere else where metal bands play to sparse industry dominated crowds. But Yakuza have something that no other metal band has: Bruce Lamont, the fire-eyed, shamanistic figure who leads the band. Lamont's voice, when he's not doing the standard underground-metal growl, is an impressive guttural bellow, but his greatest gift is his gravitas.
To find an adequate parallel to this guy's generally intense aura, you need to look outside metal, to people like Swans' Michael Gira or Lungfish's Dan Higgs-- terrifying demon-men who seem to summon hell when they stare down their audiences. In a genre where most frontmen don't carry themselves like frontmen, Lamont is an anomaly-- a man who seems bigger than whatever room he's in, especially when you're talking about a room as small as Headhunters. So Lamont left an impression-- and that was before he pulled out a motherfucking saxophone. Yakuza, see, are different.
Of Seismic Consequence is the Chicago crew's fifth album, and it finds them reaching for something mysterious and elemental on virtually every track. Opener "The Ant People" is all build and no payoff, Lamont growling wordlessly over a sustained drone that may or may not be a didgeridoo; it's not really a metal song at all. Nearly all eight minutes of "Be That as It May" are low-key and ominous, an expansive groove imperceptibly hardening until it suddenly transforms into an exploding roar. At 11 minutes, "Farewell to the Flesh" is even slower and sparer, its swirl expanding and contracting with astral-traveler assurance. But even as the band pushes itself further out into some psychedelic mindspace, some aspects stay metal as fuck. A sample lyric from "Farewell to the Flesh", for instance: "Burn the flesh from bone, taste the juices from the eye." The juices from the eye. That's some heavy shit.
Actually, though, Yakuza are often at their least interesting when they're most metal. "Thinning the Herd" is serviceably seasick prog-metal, and the ferocious riffs are there, but the whole thing feels a little pedestrian. The band is better when it deploys its stomp strategically, as on "Testing the Waters", where tribal drums and sax squawks give way to a monster Maiden-level riff. That saxophone is the band's not-so-secret weapon. Yakuza have worked with Chicago jazz guys like Ken Vandermark and Hamid Drake, but there's nothing about Lamont's instrument that suggests jazz to a neophyte like me. Rather than riffs or runs, he uses it to peal out these big bottom-heavy wails, cranking out epic guitar solos on an instrument that makes sounds no guitar could make. It's really something.
Even though it's nearly as much psych as it is metal, Of Seismic Consequence isn't some self-conscious genre-fusion experiment. Instead, it's the work of a band staring into the abyss, making music that dwarfs everything around it. Above all else, Yakuza are determined to evoke a feeling of awe. And even if they can get a bit hokey on the way there, they hit those awe notes more often than not.
