ALBUM REVIEW: The Scythe Is Remorseless – Yersin

YERSIN are one of those cool bands who draw their influences from a few obvious enough places but still manage to piece them together in a way that feels fresh and cohesive. You might hear shades of the D-beat fury of TRAP THEM, or the chainsaw death metal of ENTOMBED, or a lashing of black metal or a deluge of sludge, but taken all together as they are on the Sunderland trio’s sophomore album The Scythe Is Remorseless they avoid feeling excessively derivative of any one thing and ultimately make for a whole lot of fun.

With all those extreme influences at play it may come as a bit of a surprise that this album actually has a load of hooks. They’re always bellowed, never sung, but much like one of their most obvious UK peers in MASTIFF, YERSIN have a real knack for repeating a line or two in a way that helps these tracks to stick with their listeners a lot quicker than they otherwise might. To make things easier still they’re generally taken or at least adapted from the titles of the tracks themselves too, as is the case in Mouths Like Open Graves and the title track and the outstandingly named Lust For Crust which form a blazing run coming hot off the back of opener and lead single Triumphant.

If the hooks do catch you off guard though, what won’t is that The Scythe Is Remorseless is an absolute rager. YERSIN get all their business done in a tight 25 minutes, guitars thick with HM-2, drums relentless, vocals ridden with bile – you may well know the drill by now but the execution and presentation is no less emphatic or enthralling. Producer Joe Clayton gets full marks too, his increasingly stacked CV marking him out as the ideal man for the job as he captures the band with a real sense of live and dangerous intensity but crucially without ever muddying up the mix in the process.

Admittedly, dynamic variation is limited; they do start quiet with about 30 seconds of muffled and menacing piano in the aforementioned opener, but once they get going there isn’t really another moment where the band fully dial back the distortion or drummer Chris Mallan isn’t at least hitting something. If you’re hoping for a noodly little interlude or something like that you won’t find it, but that shouldn’t really be a problem seeing as The Scythe Is Remorseless is far from a long record and even if that sort of thing may have made things feel just that little bit sharper towards the end no-one is likely to have grown too numb to its attack by the time Doom brings things to a ferocious close.

So, to reiterate, The Scythe Is Remorseless is a total riot; it’s catchier than it has any right to be but that never comes at the expense of outright savagery, and if you’re a fan a lot of the other wonderful stuff that is happening in UK extreme music at the moment like BURNER or CALLIGRAM or the aforementioned MASTIFF then you will definitely have a great time here too.

Rating: 8/10

The Scythe Is Remorseless is set for release on January 10th via Trepanation Recordings.

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