All Hail the Yeti: All Hail the Yeti (2012)

Abominable

A lot of you are going to hate All Hail the Yeti. I’m going to drop a few names here that don’t exactly inspire good feelings amongst extreme metal fans. This band is radio-ready. They’ve got plenty of obvious metalcore in their sound. But I like it anyway.

The L.A. band takes poppy Southern sludge a la Mastodon’s The Hunter, strips it down, and goes the extra mile toward mass appeal with a radio-metalcore template and huge helpings of Slipknot. The only part of that sentence I don’t like is the “metalcore” aspect. I’ve made it no secret I’m a fan of Slipknot. And I think Soilwork’s best, uh, work was in Stabbing the Drama and Sworn to a Great Divide. With my credibility at an all-time high, I ask you to read on.


The above description pretty well captures what All Hail the Yeti is about. And unlike most every band you’ll actually hear on hard rock radio, they do it with a positive success to failure ratio. They take the harsh vocal verse /clean vocal chorus dichotomy (popularized by Slipknot and done to death by every metalcore band of the last decade) and do it well enough that it sounds vital again. “Deep Creek” and “The Art of Mourning” are fantastic examples. “When the Sky Falls” is another high-quality track, beginning on a Slipknot-esque spoken word part. The Southern flavor is a nice touch as well (see “Ruby Ridge”).

It is a far from perfect record. The biggest issue is an over-loud master. “I Am Wendigod” uses the clean/harsh vocal technique as a crutch to prop up a song that should have been scrapped. “After the Great Fire” is a shameless attempt at a hard rock epic ballad (complete with children’s choir). “Suicide Woods” is the obligatory teenager-pleasing dumb breakdown shout-along. And they end the record with something like 15 minutes of nature sounds. But it’s worth checking out anyway.

The Verdict: 3.5 out of 5 stars



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