Yat-Kha, The Ferry, Glasgow
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Your support makes all the difference.Imagine Tom Waits after several lifetimes' more fags and bad living, and you'll have an idea of Tuvan singer Albert Kuzevin's upper vocal register. When it comes to the depths of his range, no human comparisons will serve, his ultra-guttural, sub-bass growl sounding like a bellow from the bowels of the earth, or the roar of a monster.
These extraordinary noises are based on Kuzevin's native tradition of khoomei, or overtone singing, but even by Tuvan standards, his voice and style are phenomenal: while still a small boy, he was expelled from his local choir and told never to sing again. After spending his teenage years immersed in The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zep and Deep Purple, he went on to co-found the group Huun-Huur-Tu, the first act to bring khoomei's singular blend of gravelly vocal drones and unearthly split-note harmonics to a Western audience.
He was still a wannabe rocker, though, and eventually, with Soviet opprobrium no longer a fear, formed Yat-Kha to bring his two loves together.
Besides Kuzevin on vocals and guitar, the current line-up, touring to promote their fourth album Tuva.Rock, features fellow-singer Radik Tiuliush, switching between a relatively straightforward, albeit throaty tenor and his southern Tuvan variants of overtone techniques.
Tiuliush also plays the morinhuur and the igil, daddy and baby versions of the Tuvans' national instrument, the horse-headed fiddle, held like a small cello and with two strings, each comprising up to 130 hairs from a horse's tail. The percussionist Zhenya Tkachev completes the core trio, augmented by the guest bassist Scipio.
A Yat-Kha set is a meeting of extremes. Age-old, semi-sacred traditions from some of the remotest, harshest places on earth; songs composed to while away days-long treks, are yoked together with the raw, chaotic energies of the Tuvan/Siberian rock underground. "Here's another song about shepherds," says Kuzevin, only this shepherd, by the sound of it, has moved to the city, grown a Mohican and got attitude.
The driving force behind most numbers is a scorched-earth combination of 1980s-style ska-punk and breakneck heavy metal, a wall of speed-freak noise bizarrely but brilliantly layered with the sawing, buzzing reverb of Tiuliush's fiddle, and the sternum-rattling rumble of that weird and wonderful singing. Inside the mix, though, is a seething mêlée of unlikely echoes and influences, from grimy country-blues - "country and Eastern", as Kuzevin dubs it - to Big Country-style "bagpipe" guitar; sinuous Oriental melodies to cartwheeling African grooves.
Then again, they might fire into a chorus of a communist anthem, or stop the show with a mind-boggling solo display. One thing's certain - you won't go to a more memorable gig.
UK tour continues to 10 June
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