EP Review: Yersin – Born Alone, Die Alone

EP Review: Yersin – Born Alone, Die Alone

Reviewed by Eric Clifford

Did you ever listen to All Pigs Must Die? Mastiff? Nails? Cursed? Did you like it? If so, you and Yersin are going to get along famously.

Yersin sound like an antimatter warhead going off inside a closet. Close, immediate, violent. But there’s sophistication within it; moments of maudlin, cynical melodicism and bitter quietude. It’s a brand of grindy metallic hardcore that summons unto itself the sum total of every negative emotion you have ever felt, cages it in it’s balled fist, and rams it back down your throat. It’s dense, misanthropic music – bleak in form and function. And it starts with a guitar tone like a mine shaft collapsing. In terms of what it does to your brain, imagine hunting a chicken with a railgun. It’s an utterly castigating wall of distortion and the heft it imbues these deathly crust punk riffs with is beyond dispute. It simply crushes. And I expected as much – their last release (“The Scythe is Remorseless”) was a mightily pissed off piece of Martyrdod/Enabler adjacent fury too, but if anything the band have only given in further to their vituperative sides and unleashed something that sounds truly disgusting as a result.

It’s only an EP, and won’t lay claim to a vast tract of your precious time by any means, but when ladies tell me that it’s not how big it is but what you do with it that matters, I’m sure that they are talking solely about album lengths. And when what a band decides to do is an enflamed monstrosity of groove like “Steel Noose”, replete with scorching lead guitar, release length suddenly matters only insofar as I wish I had more of this to jam into my tender veins. While things do tend toward the brisker side (borderline grind on “Blasphemer”), it takes an unsavoury dip in the festering undercurrents of sludge that gurgle poxridden and mephitic about it on tracks like “Urban Menace”, which girdles it’s midsection with thick, venomous riffs and bellowed vocals that have to be yanking the singer’s lungs apart at the seams.

Moments of pained, haunting tunefulness exist too; beyond the tragic quiescence of the introduction, National treasure Sarah Jezebel Deva lends her gothic croon to “Die Alone”, gilding it with the same theatrical grandeur that she brought to the best Cradle of Filth have to offer. She adds the lustrous gleam of polished tombstones to the ugliness that Yersin are otherwise beating you to death with. I think that of all the tracks presented, it’s probably this one that best unifies the elements Yersin have touched on within the release as a whole; the nihilistic outlook, the sheer elephantine heaviness, the hooks launching out of each massive groove and shrill melody poised above like a noose, the speed married to moments of back-snapping slowdowns. All here, appropriately enough, as the glittering capstone of the release.

I wish there was more of it, honestly. Yes, yes, they work wonders with the time they’ve alloted themselves, and yes, if any of the bands I’ve thus far listed count amongst your favourites then you’ll likely be spurred to countless acts of extreme violence if you listen to Yersin above a sensible volume. But any good EP should leave you wanting more. I’ve always felt a sense of pride in Britain’s seemingly unlimited reserves of amazing bands, and so while the band (hopefully) commence writing a full-length folowup, please do in the meantime allow them to whet your appetite by kicking your whole jaw down your windpipe with “Born Alone, Die Alone”.

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