Young Hunter, Cambrian Explosion, Mammoth Salmon
Recommended
With a solid backbone of stoner-rock riffage and doom-metal grandeur, local band Young Hunter manages to touch on an ethereal sound outside of genre, something we've seen glimpses of in Northwest music over the last few years: Wolves in the Throne Room's collaborations with Jessika Skeletalia Kenney, moments of Mount Eerie's Wind's Poem, Broken Water's collaborative album with Lori Goldston. It's music with a weighted prettiness that could arguably owe as much to Leonard Cohen or Brian Eno as it does to Sabbath. Young Hunter's new self-titled album, the release of which is being celebrated tonight, is masterful in this interplay between genre and elusive non-genre. Against huge dynamic fluctuations, Benjamin Blake and Sara Pinnell's traded vocals gorgeously paint a picture of a not-too-distant future where nature decides to take back some of what it let us borrow. JOSHUA JAMES AMBERSON