Technical progress is vital to metal's character. Metal bands have always pushed themselves to be faster, heavier, more challenging, and more musically dextrous than their predecessors. That said, it's still rare when an act genuinely succeeds at altering the meta-structure of the form. Anytime a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan comes along, you can bet dime-a-dozen imitators will cheapen the impact of their innovations. To make matters worse, today we're swarmed by retro-obsessed bands hell-bent on recreating the vibe and tone of, well, name any year and heavy metal subgenre. Not to mention that rampant sectarianism fosters a mentality where superficial differences between camps become paramount and crossing barriers becomes a transgression.
Every now and again, though, a band comes along that sidesteps these conventions. With their debut album, last year's Songs of Descent, Nashville trio Yautja (named after the extraterrestrial creature from the Predator film series) reminds us that what we think of as metal today can be as boundless and mutable as the range that jazz had encompassed by 1970. A prog-minded act that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal, Yautja doesn't just stack hairpin turn after hairpin turn—an approach that was tired by technical death metal's mid-'90s peak. Instead, bassist Kayhan Vaziri, guitarist Shibby Poole, and drummer Tyler Coburn create a highly malleable, mercury-like alloy that changes shape with liquid ease yet retains the solidity of its structure. (The way their music moves, it might've been more fitting for these guys to name themselves after the villian in Terminator 2.)
As its title suggests, the new EP Songs of Lament was crafted as a companion piece to the full-length, but there are some key distinctions. For starters, Lament leans closer to a grimier, more punkish production aesthetic. Meanwhile, because Yautja came out of the gate with a flair for tempo changes, the lean toward slower sections this time around doesn't seem drastic. With Songs of Lament, Yautja once again shows that, like the art of the fastball, sheer speed is most effective when a band can mix up its delivery and hit you from unexpected angles.
Case in point: Songs of Lament closes with the nine minute-plus "Crumbling", which climaxes in a sludge/doom buildup where Poole and Vaziri churn out an ominous riff at a crawling tempo. When Coburn suddenly explodes into a flurry of fills, followed by a blast beat and a jazzy double-time figure on the ride cymbal, the song feels like it's taking off even as it trudges through muck. That one passage speaks volumes about Yautja's mindfulness when it comes pacing. In fact, one marked contrast between Lament and its predecessor is that the EP plays like an extended suite of music. As for subject matter, all three of Yautja's members write lyrics and supply vocals, with Vaziri doing the lion's share of the barking. And while the cutting lyrical content does linger at the irate end of the emotional spectrum, Yautja's nonpartisan musical approach lends the words a more sophisticated hue by default.
Understandably, Songs of Lament doesn't accomplish as much as its full-length companion does in terms of furthering metal's evolution. Moreover, the new material is rendered somewhat two-dimensional by a mix that sounds flatter in comparison to Songs of Descent's full-fidelity production. Still, the new songs certainly show what this band is capable of when it makes subtle tweaks in its approach to structure. Indeed, Songs of Lament extends the pleasures of the debut while whetting the appetite for what new wrinkles Yautja might have in store the next time around.
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