The performance spaces of Nashville clubs like The End and Exit/In have incubated one of metal’s best-kept-secret scenes, as heard in the sludgy strivings of acts like Loss, Across Tundras, and the city's own Yautja. On their debut LP, Songs of Descent, the trio keep the doomy legacy of these forebears close—but not too close, since there are plenty of other ingredients in the mix: teeth-gnashing thrash, ferocious grindcore breakdowns, slabs of Palm Desert-style stoner rock, and a little industrial ambience.
If that scans as disjointed, blame the pedigree; Bassist Kayhan Vaziri shares his duties with sludge-lords Coliseum, while axeman Shibby Poole plays bass in local hardcore outfit Nameless Cults. Rounding out the trio is drummer Tyler Coburn of Gnarwhal, whose atypical polyrhythms provide Songs of Descent’s frenzied, untraceable pulse. Mix it all together, and you’ve got one beast of a border-crossing debut.
Grind is all about the pivots, and Songs of Descent makes a conscious effort to keep things unpredictable. “Denihilist” takes a simple melodic thread as an invitation to lurch forth into oblivion, before scaling back to a swampy jam just past the halfway point. The mechanical riffs that opens “A Crawl” could have been copped from Queens of the Stone Age—until the instant when Coburn cues up the blast beats for its manic microsong of a coda. Two instrumental interludes,“(Path of Ascent)” and “(Path to Ground”), stir up unease as they plod along, massive and uncertain. The “gotcha!”’s that follow, “Denihilist” and “An Exit”, respectively, feel all the more thrilling.
To mix this monster, the band enlisted Mikey Allred, who’s played tech wizard to everyone from Hellbender to Inter Arma. His raucous, ramshackle approach is heavy on the bass, giving Vaziri’s melodic, mucky tones the auditory advantage over Poole’s noodling. This gnarled sound lends heft to hardcore-leaning tracks like “Tar and Blindness”, but can’t stick to “Faith Resigned”, a seven-minute slog that proves exhausting with its abundance of (literal) bridges to nowhere. “Teeth” treads water similarly, a teasing series of fills and fake drops that opens up, finally and agonizingly, to little more than a relative rumble.
Still, with Songs of Descent, Yautja has conjured up the brute force and brain power necessary to live up to both their monstrous namesake and the heralded hometown. World domination? Not quite. But give that surly stock more time to develop, and that just might be an intergalactic emergency.
