YOB - Our Raw Heart
Last year, Yob mastermind Mike Scheidt was diagnosed with an acute intestinal disease which required a six-hour surgery session, and it wasn’t certain if he would recuperate. After a lot of rehabilitation work, he was ready to start writing a new album with his band Yob. Our Raw Heart, the trio’s eighth longplayer, is heavily influenced by Scheidt’s time conquering his illness.
Those familiar with Yob’s previous efforts know that Yob has been for a very long time one of the most important and certainly best doom metal bands from the USA. Founded a little over twenty years ago and coming from the North-western state of Oregon, Yob have always preferred long structures, and this hasn’t changed over the years: on Our Raw Heart, the songs average about ten minutes apiece. And yet otherwise it seems that a lot has changed when it comes to the music. Although there are still a lot of harsh passages, my overall impression is that Yob have become mellower and deeper with age. The ten-minute opener Ablaze is a very meditative piece with a gorgeous and warm guitar sound. Scheidt’s vocals have become hoarser over the years, making him now sound like the lovechild between Rush’s Geddy Lee and Nazareth’s Dan McCafferty. It’s a very atypical song with an unusual structure that makes you feel like drifting along on a slow river. The Screen, another ten-minute track, starts with a monotonously repeated guitar riff and later falls into a melodic chorus. Again, not your run-of-the-mill doom metal song, but it definitely is a grower over time. In Reverie, you guessed it... another ten-minute track, is an utterly dark doom metal track with all the grace of molten lava that flows seamlessly into Lungs Reach, whose first half is very bleak before its second half at least adds some distorted guitar and guttural vocals to show you that you have landed in the deepest depths of Hell.
The second half of the album is even more intriguing. Beauty In Falling Leaves is clocking in at sixteen and a half minutes, and is a thoroughbred doom ballad that best exemplifies the pain and suffering Scheidt must have gone through the previous year. Original Face, at seven minutes one of the shorter songs, is a somewhat faster and more aggressive track. It’s not my favourite track on the album, but it’s good to get a more rocking track before Our Raw Heart ends with its sublime fourteen-and-a-half-minute long title track. This is a song full of elegy that reminds me at times of Justin Broadrick’s Jesu, and I want to point out especially the sublime lengthy guitar solo that ends the album: wonderful stuff!
I have been following Yob’s music for many years, and dare claim that Our Raw Heart sees the doom metal trio at the height of their creativity. Music so full of beauty and suffering is a rare thing these days, and I can only recommend this seventy-plus minutes epic to every fan of slo-mo metal.