YOB

The Great Cessation

Doing their crunches | Profound Lore

Hail the return of the mighty YOB, Eugene, OR’s heaviest, most monolithic thing since forever. Unless you’ve been living under a big pile of stanky dank… strike that; if that were the case, you’d surely know YOB were one of the most forward-thinking and idiosyncratic bands in all of doom-dom. Evolving from denim-wearing stoner/boogie/doom to full-on thinking-man’s abyss metal, this infamous trio called it quits in 2006. Guitarist-vocalist Mike Scheidt took a brief detour with the most excellent and very similar-sounding, Middian. R.I.P. Middian; YOB live again.

Not missing a slow-motion, waist-length, hair-fanning beat, The Great Cessation picks up the singular riff-craft that Scheidt left off with on The Unreal Never Lived, again with the help of adroit, avalanche-invoking drummer Travis Foster. These five tracks span over 60 minutes (hello 20-minute-plus title track!) and are by far their darkest and most spatial work yet: “Silence of Heaven” is a dungeon of torture, crawling the floor like a screaming, moaning, doom-y cousin of Xasthur. “Burning the Altar” begs the question: What if early Isis locked horns with Caspar Brötzmann, Slayer and High on Fire, especially Matt Pike’s Turkish-sounding bits?

Like previous YOB efforts, there’s an acknowledgment of post-metal psychedelics, but Cessation is just more crushing—more changeups between utterly slow pummelings, dissonant clean guitars, distorted six- and four-string drones, tribal drumming. One notable change is Scheidt’s vocals: His Wino-on-Drano “clean” wails are still intact, but his shrieks and barks are, somehow, extra unholy. Doom on, my brethren!

—Shawn Bosler

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