Buffalo New York’s smog spitters Yanari are some cool ass cats; if you email them they will send you a copy of their Marine Leg EP for free.  As TOTD’s resident sludge nut I had to jump on the offer and find out the scoop.  Free swill isn’t the reason this is getting a good review, nope, it’s getting a great review because it’s some fuckin’ sick, meaner than your mother crusty doom with a lot of cool musical twinges that showcases a band to keep an eye on far down the line.

Coming on like a freight train leaving the tracks and knocking a 747 out of the sky, “No Moral High Ground” brings on the feral dementia riffing like a cross-pollination of Dystopia, Bongzilla and Damad.  Helter skelter grease guitar dives into a putrid set of downer grooves with surprisingly fluid and walking bass lines that dare to step above the dual guitar trod of guitarists Joe Lipa and Alex DiMartina.  Vocalist Kristina Rose has a harrowing lower range scream that slips into death metal informed growls later on in the track and though she’s placed audibly in the mix, it feels like her roars are buried beneath a 1,000 feet of tarmac, mud and paint chips.  Bassist Paul Mietlick and drummer Bub lock onto their parts with reckless abandon and keep the material even more forceful and tightly welded to the cement when examined in tandem with the guitars.  There are enough speed-ups to render things quite interesting throughout and they never seem to keep one exact tempo across the entire EP, although their main dealings are sludgy, mountain fucker sludge/doom diatribes.  The racing punk concussion drumming on “Fake Reality is Fidelity” ignites a series of lean yet no less dirty quick riffs that dip into monstrous bouts of Sabbath blues, heavily reminding me of much missed scuzz sludge crusties Facedowninshit.  Yanari’s every single juxtaposition of ratty sound between slow crumbling grooves and fast fuck you punk hits harder than the next as Rose spatters burning words about the decay of society.  A closing spliff of a riff smokes up on some gargantuan St. Vitus style Chandler worship to excellent effect.

“Abuse” is a toe curdling, spoiled milk orgy of gutterball guitars and rolling toms that kicks into violent up-tempo shoves of more tangible heavy rock traits.  The push/pull aesthetic that is highlighted on the entire demo comes off especially strong yet again.  If Grief had more get-up and go tempo wise (like they did on …And Man will Become the Hunted) would be a great way to describe the quintet on this jam.  Viciously riffed and awesomely titled, “The Walls of our Brood” lets a bit of blues light the room of a completely pitchblack sludge mangler number.  Each riff twists in a pool of its own waste but finds enough swing to make its serpentine dance tough, memorable and sometimes quite infectiously catchy.  Don’t get me wrong, this tune culminates with a disgusting power chord puke finale that’s as heavy and slow as the genre gets and the song’s hardly describable as “nice” throughout 3:43 running time.  Good fuckin’ stuff till the last drop…

Marine Leg is a killer debut and a sonic blueprint that I can’t wait to see expanded and added onto over time.  Yanari have my favorite traits from sludge and punk nailed down pat and there’s not a wasted minute here with songs that get their point across in 4 minutes or less.  I’d fucking love to hear a whole album of this stuff but in the meantime this surely wet my whistle.

[Visit the band's website]

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