3 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: Yowie

Yowie’s consistency is change. There are long pauses between albums; roster changes; and though you’re guaranteed some instrumental mathrock noise… the exact shape that will take for each outing is up in the air.

These “consistencies” have held true for Yowie’s fourth album, Taking Umbrage, following in 2025 after 2017’s Synchromysticism, with new guitarists Daniel Ephraim Kennedy and Jack Tickner pairing with longtime drummer ‘Defenstrator,’ aka Shawn O’Connor. We did get a preview of this new arrangement – and some songs from Taking Umbrage – on Yowie’s split with Pili Coit – and I have pluses and minuses to report: on the plus side, these new players definitely don’t require any fancy studio tricks to knock out some guitarist wizardry. On the negative side, that does mean that the producer-recorded version of these songs (and the album) doesn’t change much from my first impressions, setting aside the overall upgrade in fidelity.

For a lot of bands in the “noisy all the time” range – Behold… the Arctopus!; Flying Luttenbachers; Koenijhyakkei – there can be a trajectory where they build to a place where all of the participants are essentially operating at 100%, 100% of the time. While undeniably impressive, it leaves very little space for the music to sink in, whether in the form of Arctopus’ more precise metal, Luttes’ chaos, Koenji’s high-energy swing, or, with Taking Umbrage, Yowie’s math rock. In all of these examples, though, either the eventual trajectory proves that 100% to be something of a pivot point, or the next iteration of rotating players – Yowie certainly isn’t along in that characteristic – bring something new / else to the table. Yowie, unfortunately, doesn’t get as much wiggle room here due to their sparse release schedule, pitting quite a bit on each album. And Umbrage’s seven tracks absolutely work, and tell enough of a tale to explain what the band sounds like, though at the same time, I’m so spoiled for choice on instrumental mathrock bands who can kick out many-notes-per-second that this iteration of Yowie doesn’t necessarily stand out from that crowd.

As tends to be the case, if it’s your first time around hearing this kind of stuff, it may have more impact; to my ears, older Yowie favored a bit more U.S. Maple deconstruction, or with Synchro – perhaps partially owing to having someone like John McEntire behind the mics – there was a broader sense of song that really gave the album shape. Umbrage… is a lot of riffing. Though it’s clearly not noodling, which does mean you can start to glean some ebbs and flows the more you go through it, and the “benefit” of this kind of non-stop barrage is such that you can actually listen to it on repeat fairly easily – as the sounds blend together but are active enough to not become white noise – so you will inevitably finds those ebbs and flows, but all the same: I cannot really tell one song from another, or claim that the album overall has a sequenced structure.