EP Review: Consume & Scratch

For a handful of barely post-pubescent middle class bogans who don’t seem to give a f**k, Yukon Era display a musical maturity beyond their years. It’s enough to piss you off. I wonder if they even care how good their music is, or if great music is just a consequence of having fun doing what they want.

Yukon Era have emerged from the indie sludge of their eponymous EP with their latest effort Consume & Scratch, which isn’t meant as a criticism of their first release. It was a great aesthetic, that suited the roughness of those straight shooting garage rock band style tracks. But in stark contrast, the master and mix on Consume & Scratch are much more polished and tight, which really showcases and compliments the performance and refined style of these new songs; post-futurist punk somewhere on the spectrum between Shihad and Jakob with musical allusions to both.

In my generation Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the testing ground for new pop music, like Grey’s Anatomy once was, and Westworld now is. For you it may have been Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars from Grey’s but for me Far’s Job’s Eyes from Buffy was the song that stuck with me, a song which the Yukon Era sound reminds me.

Like Job’s Eyes the songs on Consume & Scratch are a juxtaposition of dark and light. An orchestrated oscillation between a delicate fiddling and a light thrashing of their instruments. This exercise in contrast meant for the first ten seconds of the album I was expecting just another rock record, only to be happily corrected when the dreamy shoegaze verse emerged from the rabble of the intro.

Some would query the inclusion of an interlude on a potentially four track EP. It’s something Ænima era Tool would pull if they’d followed the typical marketing model of the time and released singles. In this case, and with Ænima, the Muse-ish Interlude serves as a bridge between the heavy noise and weird time signatures of album opener High Handed and the drawn out, progressive version of titular Consume & Scratch (in my opinion superior to the radio edit, which serves its own purpose, but lacks the organic pacing of the original).

Consume & Scratch is progress in the right direction and on a whole great sophomore effort from the Auckland boys (who are surely as frustrated by allusions to their age as Courtney Hate are to allusions of their gender). It’s going to be interesting to see what direction they take with their next effort.

You can find Yukon Era’s Consume & Scratch EP on the Yukon Era Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

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