Yowie - Cryptooology Skin Graft

Yowie is your prototypical Skin Graft band: splintered, angular guitars straight out of some mutant copy of Buy The Contortions, peculiar time signatures and hectic tempos often executed by double bass-propelled drumming and songs that zip by so quickly you end up stuck somewhere between bored and confused.

The group’s debut, Cryptooology, gives us seven interchangeable songs in 30 minutes, each one moving along into the next like a herd of parakeets. The attack isn’t quite intense enough to qualify as metal or obtuse enough to be considered standard-issue punk — just a lot of crazy guitars that sound like their strings are on the verge of popping.

You can’t exactly compare apples to oranges, but there are a number of bands out there that are taking this Skin Graft sound much further than bands like Yowie and bands of its ilk seem to be interested in. Yowie label-mates Gorge Trio, for instance, incorporated loads of different stylistic and compositional elements into their summer 2004 debut — keyboards, xylophones, harmonic interplay, melodies, push-and-pull dynamics, etc. They understood the power of contrast, and they got their point across by engaging the listener, not pummeling them senselessly.

Senseless pummeling is all Yowie seems to have going for it; it’s almost like an endurance test, trying to see how long you can stand the heat before you cave in to either your jangled nerves or the unrelenting ennui of it all.

Going through each track one-by-one would be useless, as each one essentially blends into the other. But that is precisely what makes Cryptooology such a disappointing listen: Listening to these guys handle such complex changes, you just know that they have the proper tools to make interesting music. They could use their vastly superior technical abilities to create something truly new and awe-inspiring. I suppose they either do not know what to do with the tools or simply are not concerned with knowing.

All in all, Cryptooology is a decent record for what it is: a rambunctious half hour of unmitigated battering. It’s just not a record that really seems worth a second go.

–Jonathan Pfeffer