Review & Track Premiere: Yatra, All is Lost
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on September 8th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream the premiere of ‘Eyes of Light’ from Yatra’s All is Lost. Album is out Oct. 9 on Grimoire Records. Says Dana Helmuth: “Athalon is a mythical place or kingdom I invented in the Yatra world, based off the Greek root definition of a major event or trial. ‘Sceptres seeking of Athalon’ pertains to these self righteous leaders and charlatans portraying their magical world that will exist if you bow down and follow their sceptre. ‘Eyes of light they shine, like broken diamonds of night.'”]
Maryland sludge upstarts Yatra will release their third album, All is Lost, on Oct. 9. The record reunites the three-piece with Grimoire Records, and even before you hit play and hear the opening squiggly riff of the title-track that launches the nine-song/34-minute beast, it is an offering of both the familiar and unfamiliar from the band. Being back with Grimoire means they returned to the studio with producer/engineer Noel Mueller, who of course helmed their 2018 debut, Death Ritual (discussed here), while the subsequent Jan. 2020 LP, Blood of the Night (review here), was recorded by Kevin Bernsten and released through STB.
They complement this return to roost with a sonic turn toward the extreme that one can only listen to and think of as the manifestation a band like Yatra has to be feeling during the course of this wretched waste of a year. Normally hard-touring and already plenty uncompromising when it comes to their sound, All is Lost lives up in terms of sound to the despair laid forth in its title. A group who’d put the time in to garner significant momentum in their favor over the last couple years, hitting the road on numerous occasions for stretches long and short — including a we-mean-business Fall 2019 European run — there’s a chunk of 2020 that should by rights have been theirs to devour as they saw fit on higher-profile tours supporting the second record.
The tradeoff, maybe, is that the great gnashing of teeth that songs like “All is Lost,” the lumbering “Tyrant Throne” and “One for the Mountain” — which show some of guitarist/vocalist Dana Helmuth‘s cleaner-singing approach as it seems to be developing in real-time; a mixture that still calls to mind Matt Pike but particularly in “Tyrant Throne” has an edge of Slough Feg‘s Mike Scalzi too — unfolding after “All is Lost” and the likewise sharp-edged, fucking-heavy-fucking-metal, someone-remind-me-to-send-drummer-Sean–Lafferty-a-thank-you-card-for-opening-up-that-groove highlight chorus of “Winter’s Dawning,” which follows. If progressive death metal is the new doom, and it is, then Helmuth, bassist Maria Geisbert and Lafferty will continue to walk their own path in dirt-coated metallic extremity — there’s very little one would call progressive here, apart maybe from an attention to the tightness of their songs on the whole.
“One for the Mountain,” which would seem to end side A while giving over to the sitar-introduced tracklist centerpiece “Blissful Wizard” — best sitar on a death metal cut I’ve heard since Amorphis‘ “Tuonela”; I think also the only, but still — is easier to read as catchy because of the relatively clear vocals, but “Blissful Wizard” has a strong hook of its own, and as noted with “Winter’s Dawning” above and pieces as well like “All is Lost” and side B’s “Talons of Eagles” and “Eyes of Light” that begin with their title-lines and immediately establish themselves in the listener’s mind through harshly-barked repetitions thereof, that hook is hardly alone. Extremity of purpose coinciding with a honing of craft. Brutality that refuses to relinquish nod for technicality or songwriting for aesthetic. “Eyes of Light,” blastbeats and all, is death metal. To be sure, much of All is Lost is. Even on the slower stretches of “Tyrant Throne” or in the penultimate plodder “‘Twas the Night,” there is a creeping-Slayer sinister feel to Helmuth‘s riff that Geisbert and Lafferty bring all the more forward through their accompanying lurch.
It’s not necessarily that the readjustment of priorities in Yatra‘s sound is a revolutionary act for them — I compared their last record to Carcass, doubt I was the first to do so, and even at its most primitive their output has to-date carried more than an air of bludgeoning, if at times primarily in the vocals — but it goes back to the blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and it’s the direct engagement with what were previously the darkest and harshest aspects of Yatra that, coupled again with the songwriting, makes All is Lost a moment of realization for the band. It is of course impossible to know now how much this one LP will define the path they follow moving forward from it as they inevitably will — or won’t, in which case the point is moot — but what Yatra forge in this material, from the title-cut all the way through the agonizing twists of “Northern Lights” at the album’s finish, is a sonic persona for themselves that rests more within its own individuality than in the conventions of genre.
That is, All is Lost is the point in their career at which Yatra have unveiled not just their best collection of tracks up to now, but a perspective through which they’re approaching the creation of those tracks in the first place. Once a band is pigeonholed as a thing, it can be nearly impossible to work against that — see “sludge upstarts” above; it just rolls off the keyboard, when in fact the record positions them as more stylistically than just sludge (nothing against sludge) and mature beyond “upstart” status — but on the back of All is Lost, Yatra have the potential to transcend niche genre and engage a broader metal audience.
And this is why, even among the hordes of bands unable to tour in 2020, one feels all the more sympathy for Yatra. Because, instead of sitting around, unable to get on tour, they pushed ahead and made a new full-length, and in so doing managed to end up right back where they started from in January: having just put together their best work yet and still be unlikely to give it the live support it deserves. Is all lost? No. But all is ephemeral. In addition to not knowing what Yatra might do next, I’ll also cop to having no idea what the world is going to do next — nothing good, if past is prologue — but as much as the momentum the band built behind them for Death Ritual and into Blood of the Night can be sustained through releasing All is Lost, if they’re going to return to playing live with their former fervency, that momentum will need to be fed at some point.
Or maybe they just become a studio band, play the odd socially-distant gig and make that work. Again, I don’t know. Who the hell does? But today, no, all is not lost. Yatra just made their best album yet. They’ll lose some heads with it, but probably gain even more, and the viciousness of their execution is a statement unto itself that just because it can’t be hand-delivered doesn’t mean punishment isn’t to be meted out. They went back home and found themselves. It’s like the start of a rom-com, only with deathsludge riffs and talons lacing into weak flesh.
So, fucking a.
