Yugula – Cantos a una tierra muerta
Self-released : Review by Miloš Šebalj
Show of hands, who here remembers when a demo meant a worn-down home-dubbed tape with xeroxed cover and just about audible sound of a band’s live rehearsal room? Did I just make myself appear to be about a thousand years old? Well, I’m not, in my days a demo usually meant a burned CD-R with a carefully xeroxed cover (in colour sometimes). Even the sound on it was tolerable.
Upon receiving this neatly printed, designed and colourful (well, considering the genre, as colourful as allowed) CD, my mind immediately went to an EP format. Four tracks, lasting around twenty-eight minutes, sounds about right. Though I’ve heard shorter recordings being called full-length albums. Whatever the case may be, online search (see, I told you I’m not too old) revealed Yugula takes “Cantos a una tierra muerta” to be their second demo. And who am I to disagree…
Anyway, please do not think of this as criticism. It’s just my train of thought and a convenient way to enter this review.
Yugula is a two-piece entity established a couple of years ago in the lovely Spanish town of Salamanca. What’s surprising is that the “lovely” doesn’t end there. Particularly if you take note of the front cover and the demo’s title. The band describe themselves as a doom/black metal band with ambient touches, which is correct and their music is to the point when it comes to all three mentioned genres. However, it doesn’t slip into depressive, suicidal area. Instead, it combines the raw atmosphere of black metal with doom metal’s emotion. Plus, the added ambient passages which help guide you through these lengthy songs in the direction Yugula wants.
Now, call me a hopeless Floydian, but for me there’s an unmistakable Pink Floyd influence, somewhat in the direction they took on “Animals”. I’m mostly hearing it in the guitar parts of the second part of the demo, titled “Latidos de la tierra muerta”. These moments do not ultimately alter Yugula’s musical direction, but they do add flavour.
The songs on “Cantos a una tierra muerta” are fairly slow, lengthy, but more than dynamic in their flow, so any talk of minimalism or repetitiveness goes out the window. Naturally, nobody should expect a never-heard-before material or a creative genius that pushes boundaries. If you’re a fan of, let’s say, traditional German black metal and traditional British doom, you might find Yugula quite interesting. Bethlehem or Winterblut; Cathedral or Anathema. For example.
A strong demo, musically, I would like it to be stronger on the vocal part. Or at least more diverse, since these screams of anguish play a role to a certain point. These too can be more convincing. By that, I mostly mean that they could be dragged more to the front in the production process. As it stands, the vocalist might just be in the other room from the rest of the band, screaming his lungs out to be present in the soundscape. Perhaps adding another vocal style or another vocalist altogether, with different type of scream might do the trick.
All things considered, I might as well get back to the beginning. Yugula still thinks of themselves as a demo band. This recording definitely feels exactly like something a demo band must go through. Sanding out the rough edges of their personal style and finding a proper way to present itself to the wider audience. From the sound of it, “Cantos a una tierra muerta” is just about at the end of this process.
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