[Click play above to stream Yeti on Horseback’s The Great Dying in full. Album is out Sept. 30 on Medusa Crush Recordings.]

If you were thinking of, say, tuning high and playing fast, Canadian four-piece Yeti on Horseback strongly advise against it. The Ontario atmosludgers make their debut via Medusa Crush Recordings with The Great Dying, a title that seems to nod — emphasis on “nod” throughout — in the direction of YOB‘s expanses, though Yeti on Horseback are altogether darker and more unipolar in their vocal extremity, despite some variety between screams and growls.

An initials-only lineup of RP (guitar/vocals), MS (guitar), NS (bass) and SR (drums) execute six tracks, only one of them under nine minutes long — the interlude “Lynch (A Prelude)” (2:43) that precedes “Elephant Man” (12:43) — and from the second that opener “Tree of Death” (9:23) kicks in its chug from the quiet intro, they plummet downward into a cavernous sonic punishment. So grueling is the course of The Great Dying‘s 63 minutes that one might get lost along the way in Yeti on Horseback‘s morass of screams, rolling semi-cosmic doom groove and unremitting bleakness of mood. It’s a lot to take in, in other words.

They do change things up somewhat, in the aforementioned interlude (or prelude) and in the song that follows, adding cleaner guest vocals, but there’s a root in RP‘s vocals that’s metal and somebody in this band listened to or continues to listen to Devin Townsend — I promise I’m not just saying that because they’re Canadian — so there’s a bit more going on either way than just a doom band making doom that sounds like other doom.

For example, there’s sludge. Lots of it. It would be unfair to compare Yeti on Horseback directly to Eyehategod, as it’s about the laziest line one can draw for anything low-toned and screaming, but to go with their metallic side, they have a raw sensibility that seems to come from a mindset of the subgenre. As “Tree of Death” rolls through one part and another en route to the lumbering 14-minute longest cut “Viking Mushroom Tea,” the plod that emerges becomes a defining aspect of what the band does, along with the disaffection their output feels intended to convey.

Guitars offer some lead/chug interplay early behind the layered screams in the early march of “Viking Mushroom Tea,” but the chug remains primary until the guitars drop out to whispers over the drums, the band gradually making their way back to fully-weighted fare in the middle third of the track, getting there with surprisingly little ceremony.

A dirge is at the core of “Viking Mushroom Tea” — appropriate enough to the title’s reference — and held even in the quiet stretch by the drums, and though the immediate guitar line in the subsequent “Fables and Lies” (11:03) is faster and riffed in Mike Scheidt-style, the bell sounds that complement it build on that theme. A highlight for its cyclical drum performance, the near-centerpiece proves patient despite its more uptempo beginning, breaking after three minutes to a moment of quiet before smashing in effectively to its verse, which holds sway firmly.

They shift again into faster riffing and finish with another smooth transition to that verse progression, ending, naturally, with a return of the bells, but the journey along the path they’ve set remains engaging in that meant-to-be-a-slow-and-a-challenge kind of way. If it was pleasing to the ear all the time, it wouldn’t be sludge. They’d be doing it wrong. They’re not.

All the same, there’s a palpable sense of catching breath as “Lynch (A Prelude)” takes hold with its samples from director David Lynch‘s 1980 masterpiece, The Elephant Man, leading into the famous lines, “I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being!” at the start of “Elephant Man” itself that underscore the feelings of otherness conveyed throughout The Great Dying.

That summation, and the grand intro of “Elephant Man” itself would seem to be fitting for a closer, but Yeti on Horseback clearly didn’t come this far to half-ass it at the finish, so while “Elephant Man” features the album’s best lead work and arguably its largest and most effective chugging, in addition to the aforementioned guest vocals, and pushes a sense of arrangement about as far as the band goes here, it works in concert with actual-closer “Dragged down to Hell” (13:24), which was previously released as a digital single.

Granted, it feels somewhat tacked on, but it’s hard to hold that against Yeti on Horseback, who’ve made no attempt to hide their will toward working in longer forms and use the last track to strip everything back down to its basic components and draw the record to a rumbling, churning, crashing finish, the last minute-plus given to a stretch of low-end noise.

Given that The Great Dying is their debut, Yeti on Horseback have put together an impressively cohesive collection culled no doubt from their four years’ experience discovering their aesthetic breadth as a unit. They have room to grow, but have set themselves up well for that in any number of directions — tuning low and playing slow isn’t a bad place to start — and if this is the kind of crushing they’re going to do at the outset, then it’s only going to be worthwhile to pay attention to what comes next.

Yeti on Horseback on Thee Facebooks

Yeti on Horseback on Bandcamp

Medusa Crush Recordings on Bandcamp

Medusa Crush Recordings on Thee Facebooks