Album Review: All Hail The Yeti - Within The Hollow Earth

Every generation has its own music for the outsiders and downcast. The people who live in the shadows need a soundtrack of their own, one that will always be shrouded in comparison to what the shiny happy people listen to. When I was younger, that music was grunge. I wasn't of the right age or perspective to have embraced it at the time, but it spoke to so many who needed to see the light at the end of the tunnel could be a metaphor for death or salvation, if not both. That would shift in the next generation to nu-metal, where depression turned to anger and self-pity. So what is that music today?

If we judge by All Hail The Yeti, it's not something entirely new, but a blending of the past with the present. Their sound is part Alice In Chains at their heaviest, part Slipknot at their most accessible. The harmonies in "Headless Valley" are straight out of the Staley/Cantrell playbook, but the guitar tone and the shouted verses are pure Corey Taylor. Our memories are a patchwork of moments that burned into our minds, and that psychology is what All Hail The Yeti's music reminds me of. They sound like a collage of some of the most important sounds in outsider metal over the last thirty years.

When we say something sounds timeless, perhaps what we mean is our memories haven't faded enough for the moment to feel like it ever passed us by. Or perhaps it simply means that since almost no band ever retires, time no longer exists in the world of music. The haunting harmonies don't sound out of the moment at all, despite their old reference point. If anything, they sound fresher than the more modern elements to the record's sound. Much as the planets move in cycles, so to does music, and both of the dominant elements of All Hail The Yeti's sound are seeing themselves come back in fashion. How fortunate for them.

What happened after the first wave of grunge is that the influenced bands, unfortunately led by Nickelback, bled the music of any of the actual emotion that made it so powerful. They latched onto the dark tones, but never figured out it was the honest songwriting that was the real key. All Hail The Yeti comes far closer to recapturing that spirit, writing songs and melodies that will work on radio, but don't for a second sound like they were written for that purpose. There isn't a sense of pandering here, the way there is with a lot of mainstream rock and metal.

If we think about time being an hourglass, the sands might get more compacted as they pile up. Condensing the last thirty years, the result would probably sound a lot like All Hail The Yeti. That makes them an interesting thought experiment, or maybe a remnant of memories and influence. Whatever esoteric meaning I might want to attach, the fact of the matter is they are doing something rather interesting within the confines of a tired genre. They took a different path of the evolutionary road than the big names of the mainstream, and they are the better for it. All Hail The Yeti is unique, which we can't say for everyone.