Yob - Live 1/23/12 - The Bourbon Theater, Lincoln, Nebraska

Yeah, I may be getting old but I can still rock out the hell out. I certainly don't feel 42 most of the time and I still get excited when a band I love comes to town. I saw that doom masters YOB were gonna be here before hitting the road with Tool, and knew it was maybe my only good chance to see the band that made my number-one album last year.

It was on a Monday, so that sucked, but I still couldn't pass it up. After all, this was gonna be up-close and personal. Intimate.

The Bourbon Theater in Lincoln, Nebraska is a tiny one but it still draws some pretty big names in heavy rock music, believe it or not. Clutch and The Sword come to mind. I don't know why it surprised me so much that YOB would also be appearing there. I guess I just never expected it.

I got there early, not so much to see the opening bands but more to browse the merch. I'm glad I hadn't ordered Atma on vinyl yet 'cause there it was, all shiny and new. I grabbed one, plus a shirt, and then noticed an album cover I hadn't seen before. It wasn't one of the band's regular releases. Turns out it was one of only a few vinyl demos the band had for sale so I got one of those too.

"Lucky you got one," the guy behind the table said. "Only 3 left and then they're all gone. Totally."

Sweet. I took the stuff out to the car, had a small break and headed back inside. By the time the first two bands finished the place was getting crowded and I decided to grab a spot as close as I could. Yes. A little stage-right from the drum kit.

YOB come out with smiles on their faces and acknowledge the crowd - maybe 100 people. This is gonna be an epic night. I couldn't believe I was about to hear this band in such a small venue. The whole stage is maybe seven or eight feet deep and 15-20 feet across. Barely enough room for the band and their equipment. And there I am, with my nose literally 12 inches from the mic stand. The stage comes up to the middle of my shins and I'm braced with the front of my thighs pressed up against huge Yamaha speakers.

I'm ready. Let's do this!

After a short sound check YOB tears into "Prepare The Ground", the first earth-trembling track from Atma. I'm not prepared. I had a thought about grabbing a pair of ear plugs earlier that day at work but that's as far as I got. A thought. Too late now. After the first couple riffs it doesn't matter anyway.

To tell you the truth, I totally lost myself somewhere in the middle of that first song. I didn't have anyone shoving me from behind and no one was brushing either of my shoulders. It was almost like I was the only one there and YOB was playing just for me. My own little private concert in Nebraska. Fucking awesome. I had plenty of room; my body was writhing and contorting to the thunderous grooves being laid down.

I didn't find myself until maybe the third song, I think it was "Atma", when Mike S. broke a guitar string. He apologized and took a couple minutes to fix it himself. No guitars techs at this show, but I didn't mind at all.

"I needed a break anyway," I thought to myself. Maybe I do feel old - my neck sure does. Damn.

YOB tear it up. During a couple songs I find myself fixating on drummer Travis Foster, who has a focused, determined look on his face as he's bashing away. His arms contort in ways I didn't know were possible as he apparently tries to beat his drum kit to death with two wooden sticks. Not since WEEDEATER have I seen such a punishing performance.

A good hour or more after they started, YOB follows up with a cool TOOL cover and then finish the show with "Quantum Mystic", off The Unreal Never Lived. I wipe my face with my shirt and then rub my eyes. Is it over? Wow. That's when I try to clear my ears and remember there's nothing in there.

The crowd fizzles out and I notice the band members tediously breaking down their equipment. "Now would be a good time to go get those albums from the car," I thought, and so I did. All three guys signed them for me without hesitating and listened graciously as I thanked them for coming to little old Lincoln. Great bunch of fellas. I wished them luck on the rest of their tour and told them I hoped they have fun.

"We already are," Mike said and then thanked me and my friends for coming out. He expressed that he's also a little nervous about thousands and thousands of people staring back at him in the coming month. Unexpected bodily functions are a possibility, he joked. Still, go see 'em if there's a show anywhere near you. I can only hope your experience was a great as mine.

To me, this show wasn't just a little warm-up before their big arena tour on the east coast with TOOL. It was special. It was an intimate night with YOB and I'll never forget it.

--Heddbuzz

Yob - Atma - Two Reviews by Two Ripplers

 

An album that struck our writers so hard we had to review it twice!


 I’m glad the new Yob album is finally out so I can go on a doom metal diet. There’s a lot of good doom out there but Yob blows just about everybody else out of the water. Their power, originality and ungodly heaviness is something to behold. Yob’s popularity has greatly increased the past few years and even the New York Times has raved about the band. When they came to NYC in July a lot of curiosity seekers got their doors blown off by their pure molten metal. It was obvious some of these people had never seen a real metal band that plays loud and headbangs through the whole show. That’s probably the thing I admire most about Yob. They have a lot of experimentation and diverse set of influences in their music but everything they do is METAL. These aren’t dudes who grew up on indie rock and heard Black Sabbath for the first time in college. These are true followers of the One Commandment – intense metal is all that you need.

Atma picks up where 2009’s The Great Cessation left off and climps higher on the scale of hardness. Yob songs are long and the new album is no exception. Skull crushing opener “Prepare The Ground” pounds for a full 3 minutes before guitarist/vocalist Mike Scheidt starts screaming his mystical lyrics. Mike’s vocals are a turn off for some people but I love his voice. At times he reminds me of the clean metal singing of David Wayne from Metal Church and other times of the harsh grunts of Blaine Cook of The Accused. Either way his vocals are impressive and the way he can switch between styles reminds me of the almighty Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas. Mike’s guitar playing is also great. Ultra heavy and downtuned yet you can still hear the notes in the riffs. Bassist Aaron Rieseberg pummels a Gibson Thunderbird bass and it’s pure filth but stays in the pocket with Travis Foster’s drums. Heavy! And how the hell do these guys remember all the parts for these long-ass songs?

The title track has a strong Black Sabbath influence, right down to the rain and tolling bells of the intro. When the riff kicks in, it’s a long slow ride that brings to mind Black Flag’s water torture experiments on side two of My War. “Before We Dreamed Of Two” is a 16 minute mind fuck of psychedelic guitar, trippy samples and guest vocals from Scott Kelly of Neurosis. This is what happens when you listen to Animals by Pink Floyd after a ride on the mescalator at a Slayer show on the Hell Awaits tour. Weird but still totally metal. “Upon The Sight Of The Other Shore” must be the single since it’s only 7 minutes. The album wraps up with the 13 minute “Adrift In The Ocean.” The first third of the song is pretty quiet with some definitely David Gilmour influenced guitar playing before the band kicks in with a heavy groove.

Atma is not for the faint of heart but repeated listens can pay long term dividends. Definitely one to play loud as you drop out of life with bong in hand.


 --Woody

Okay, so, not as "metal" as previous effort Great Cessation--more hippy, more earthy, tuned up from A to B-- but just as cool.

Warm, ritualistic, definitely-spiritual somehow, maybe religious-in-the-formal-sense, while at the same time being friendly, accessible, again, hippy-ish in its lack of hostility and openness to the listener.

Opens with the simple B riff of "Prepare the Ground" with its blend of tribal-funky and crushing. (No easy feat, that.)

Mike Scheidt and his Geddy Lee-ish high-end vocals welcome you, though direly, after one minute of rain and distant church bells at the beginning of  the title track, and about halfway through it revolves around a triplet-on-the-low-string riff, the rhythm section lurching in and out, a voiceover popping up now and again.

"Before We Dreamed Of Two," with its chant-like backup vocals at around 4:00, reminds me of every Zen retreat I've even been to-- and is also metal as fuck.

Scheidt and his voice reiterate the great juxtaposition here: the vocals are the venom in the syrup, the arsenic in the punch-- they're raspy, often rageful and somewhat black metal-ish, and they contrast well with the slow, reverent riffs from which Atma is built.

How does it compare to older releases? It's more immediate. Whereas the beginning of The Great Cessation, when that first low A chord bottoms out and just fucking resounds like a heartstring from the House of Usher, was a mighty, distant, massive Heraldic Summoning by the Gods (seriously-- when you meet your God, if it doesn't sound like that, change religions), Atma is a much subtler, more organic kind of mighty, like the old hippy playing his low tuned lapsteel guitar on the street corner, who gives you the impression he's the embodiment of some Very Old Wisdom, and is only toying with you by being in the human form in the first place.

Atma is just as powerful as its predecessor, but much more "after-hours jam session at a tiny bar" versus Cessation's Roar From The Temples.

Frankly, I would've been just as satisfied with Cessation II-- but this is an awesome surprise and riff on/evolution of that classic Yob sound. Definitely top 5 of the year.


--Horn

www.myspace.com/yobdoom

Great Defunct Bands: The Devil and the Sea

From Austin "By way of Louisiana, motherfucker" Texas, The Devil and the Sea were potentially a Great Band. They broke up sometime in 2009.

A self-described "ghettotech/ healing and easy-listening/ metal" sludge act, there were ominous writings for some time on their myspace page ("...is deader than a door nail."), and when I emailed Chad from their label Acerbic Noise Development in August of last year, he unfortunately confirmed the unseemly death.

"Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" was their original name. They shortened it for copyright violation reasons.

Their first official full length LP, Heart vs Spine (originally released 1/29/08) was mastered by none other than Sanford Parker, and sounds like a Southern version of Yob, with some Sunn O))) worship going on in the background.

It's as cool as it sounds.

...and it sounds like mighty men, warriors in a longboat, shouting bravely and happily and gamely over the waves of Charybdis, a comparison perhaps not surprising because their of their original name...which was used in the same context as Scylla and company....

Criticism is not nay-saying, good versus bad, disjunctive categories: it's a method, ideally developed/ divined by the writer, given to you, the reader, to re-interpret something based on new perceptions, i.e., "this is why I liked it, this is how I see this band/artist: here's why you might also choose to perceive them this way...."

Good music "criticism" is allowing your perceptions to be bent, just enough to alter their trajectory and maybe put you in line with the music in question.

So allow me to point you at the Truth in vinyl:

Heart vs Spine sadistically out-waits you, it's aggressively patient... it refuses chord changes, long after you've forgotten that chords do that... after your descendants have calcified....

It's an oily, blackened, Bourbon County Stout of a sound--

Track one, "Batwing," its initial riff a combination of open chord and dissonant open notes....

"My Soul is My Abacus," (an instrumental all the way up to 4:30... the mutation of an ugly cancerous riff begins at 5:14, growing and pulsing and swelling into morbid riffosity) intros with definitely greasy bass, and vocals radio-ed in from the 1940s on a Bakelite tabletop radio... which totally works...

"Heart vs Spine" is 14 minutes, a huge part of which is one chord, played as an octave (A flat to A flat-- craaaazy detuned, babs), ride cymbal and distant howl of the probably- tortured... dig that sudden stop at 4:39 to remind you we're not a force of nature, jack, we're actually just three guys rocking the fuck out-- and we can stop, on a dime, whenever we want....At around ten minutes we start, oh, so subtly... slowing... grinding down... like the entropy of a doomed evolutionary line....

Overall, it's swinging heavily, rustily lurching sludge metal with a hint of Robert Johnson satanic blues... with ambient and industrial's space and fatness... and sludge and industrial's repetitiveness... it's nearly what you'd expect from sludge, yet as well contains those other elements....

Is it ambient that grooves enough to be sludge...?

Are they on some sort of heaviness continuum? Has TDATS merged through some forbidden door between genres...? Is that why they're so badass? Is that why we hear them as being heavy in the first place? Is heaviness really just "badassness" in audible form?

I'm a goddamned genius!

In 2006 they released a demo called...MMVI. It's responsible for their getting signed, and in and of itself is pretty cool. It also contains a slightly different version of "Monolith," but otherwise the tracks are distinct from Heart vs. Spine.

And get the t-shirt-- it's wicked soft and well-fitting and looks sinister (it really is, it's one of my favorites; this is the first time I've ever mentioned a shirt in a review)-- help out Acerbic Noise Development-- they were cool to me via email with absolutely no reason to be. Even Decibel's review of MMVI mentions the shirt... (I can't find the link; you'll have to trust me.)

--Horn

Buy here: Heart vs Spine
buy here mp3: Heart Vs Spine

TDATS myspace http://www.myspace.com/devilandthesea

Acerbic Noise Development: http://www.acerbicnoise.com/store/clothing/