by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Zeno’s distance paradoxes involve splitting distances into smaller and smaller intervals. You know what I’m talking about, even if you’ve never heard of Zeno, a contemporary of Socrates in the way back times of ancient Athens. It goes like this: pick something in motion, an arrow flying toward a target, say, or Achilles running after a tortoise. If you freeze the arrow in motion in a single nanosecond of time, and then you do it again, and again, the arrow itself appears still. Furthermore, if you divide the distance between a thing in motion traveling toward something else, say by half, over and over, the paradox necessitates that Achilles will never catch the tortoise.
This is all well and good, and, of course, total bullshit. The arrow slung from the bow hits its target, Achilles catches the tortoise, assuming his heel isn’t acting up. Yet, listening to Yautja’s The Lurch – which, just a year out from its release, is already a classic of the experimental metal genre – one gets the sense that Zeno may have been onto something. The rhythms, the sturm und drang, the push/pull tension, the Frankenstein’s monster lurch of this colossal album defy the accepted parameters of recorded music.
Yautja is somehow out of time and perfectly in sync for the entirety of this remarkable album’s 46 brain-bending minutes. In fact, by the time the band breaks into the crushing riff that lynchpins final track “Before the Foal” then flips it on its head, with drummer Tyler Coburn’s galloping blast beats headed in one direction and guitarist Shibby Poole and bassist Kayhan Vaziri’s menacing riffs headed in the other, you feel like you’re being drawn and quartered. It’s totally rad and completely insane.
The Lurch is Nashville-based Yautja’s first album for metal giant Relapse Records and a better label debut is hard to imagine. Yautja delivers on every promise and threat made on Songs of Lament and Songs of Decent – and then some. The first thing one notices on opener “A Killing Joke” is how massive Yautja sounds, which the band attributes to working with Scott Evans at Steve Albini's legendary Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. The Lurch sounds every bit as good as Kurt Ballou’s best God City output, Converge’s All We Love We Leave Behind and Sumac’s What One Becomes. However, impeccable sonics are just a jumping off point. The poetry and conflict of Yautja’s creative, innovative riffs and the labyrinth drumming are what make The Lurch the best metal album of the last twelve months.
Lyrically, the album tackles what the press release calls the “personal frustrations and sociopolitical observations of its creators” while discussing the displacement of local communities and the overall fuckery of technology and systemic inequality. Heavy music, much like horror films and novels, is an optimal medium to dissect Big Problems in a way that feels visceral, mirroring how the problems present in this imperfect world of ours: frustratingly endemic, maddeningly entrenched, infuriatingly intractable. The complexity of Yautja’s music speaks to the complexity of the issues we face, and we have all three members’ raging howls to guide us through their metaphoric examination of society’s ills.
Throughout the album, the band repeatedly pulls the proverbial rug out from the listener. The album is a thing in constant motion, always changing. Noise, thrash, speed, bonkers time-changes, The Lurch has it all. Contortionist riffs and sprinting rhythms double back on themselves like ascending switchbacks on a mountain pass – the stakes get higher, the danger is real, but the band is always in control. While “Wired Depths,” “The Spectacle,” and “Catastrophic” reach vertigo-inducing heights, objectively, each of the album’s nine songs has something that if you were watching the band perform it live, you’d tug the sleeve of the person next to you and point in disbelief. Even the album cover’s impressionist painting of what appears to be super-tripped out interpretation of Alien Vs Predator speaks to the band’s immersive commitment to fearless experimentation. The colors run at one another as if in defiance of an order to sit still.
And goodness, does it ever pay off. The mighty riff of “Clock Cleaner” at the album’s center, repeatedly interrupted by churning drum fills and intersecting guitar squeals, is a good example of Yautja’s thesis: play something both head-bobbing and ferocious, then fuck it up, then come back to it – but differently – maybe with a double kick assault, a beefy bass attack or an all-out three-member blitzkrieg. By the time the band returns to “Clock Cleaner’s” opening riff in the song’s final minute, you’ve been on a wild ride. It’s not over, though, as “Catastrophic” bursts from the gates with one of the album’s most melodically sinister riffs before exploding into a punk metal breakdown. It feels at this point like the band may be cornered, with nowhere to ratchet up the intensity. Nope. Yautja doubles down on the sinister riff, but this time drummer Tyler Coburn is playing at a pace one instinctively feels is breaking the physical laws of the universe. It is now that you glimpse Yautja’s own paradox: a band this good should be the biggest thing in heavy music.