3 out of 5

Produced by: Alaska B.

Label: Suicide Squeeze

Art-rock, space opera collective Yamantaka // Sonic Titan return with a more longer form story, even allowing the runtime to include some more traditional “songs,” which is somewhat to the album’s detriment.

Growth is, of course, a good thing.  The prior EPish experience was a grand build-up of a few factors, but those factors were captured with such wonderfully room-filling exuberance, you felt like you were, truly, listening to a performance, start to finish, and not tracks 1 through whatever on an album.  Uzu, some narrative focusing around a folklore character bearing that name, (sorry, I’m sure there’s important meaning there) balloons the group’s sound to incorporate more New Wave electronics, more rock, more direct singing, more breakdowns.  Alas, only the first descriptor from that group really bears fruit, as its a reasonable extension of their established tribal chant, just with some gloss tossed in.  The rest of it somewhat breaks the spell.  Take ‘Hall of Mirrors,’ which has a nice ebb and flow buildup from the previous tracks, shattered (womp) by when Ruby Koto Atwood’s ethereal bellows shift to a speak-rant thing.  It puts a human element back in the work that could be intriguingly lost in the reverbed mix.  It’s not bad, it’s just not necessarily the sound that seems to work best with the band.  Hiccups prior and post this moment come when YT // ST tries to act like a proper rock band, with mad riffage and drum fills; to be frank, the execution is just off a tad, such that it feels a bit programmatic and unnatural.  The production bears this out: the cavernous sound serves that New / Noh wave style, but it hollows out the rock moments, letting the thump of drums get too washed out by the guitar.

Meanwhile, when the group does what they do best – a plodding beat, distorted, fuzzed out vocals, the album absolutely sings.  And there’s enough of this – parts of Whale Song, the two parts of Seasickness, the penultimate track One – to make the album satisfying.  Unfortunately, that means it’s also enough to make the less stellar moments stand in contrast.

YT // ST has a unique sound, and that can be hard to extend.  It’s not exactly that less is more, but personal preference would be for the group to further explore the sounds of their previous EP than to try to incorporate other genre elements.