Here’s the press release:

Oh, what a year it has been for the mighty doom metallers YOB! First they release one of the most highly respected albums in recent memory with Atma via Profound Lore. Now the band is happy to announce that they will be direct support to TOOL on the progressive titans’ upcoming Jan/Feb North American tour. With two behemoths such as this, fans can expect one of the most impressive tours of the year!

The following dates have been announced with more to be unveiled in the coming days.

01/28 TD Garden Boston, MA
01/29 Susquehanna Bank Center Camden, NJ
01/31 Mohegan Sun Arena Uncasville, CT
02/01 Izod Center East Rutherford, NJ
02/03 TBA
02/04 Bojangles’ Coliseum Charlotte, NC
02/06 Bank Atlantic Center Sunrise, FL
02/07 UCF Arena Orlando, FL
02/08 Gwinnett Center Arena Duluth, GA

The Profound Lore debut from Arkansas doom outfit Pallbearer is called Sorrow and Extinction, and it’s due out Feb. 21, 2012. I guess it was a couple weeks ago, as I started putting together the post for the 2011 readers poll, that I started thinking more about 2012 releases and what was to come, rather than looking back on the year that this one has been. And today, I got to hear this album from Pallbearer for the first time, and yesterday, I got to review the Orange Goblin record, and I feel like things are going to be pretty good going into next year.

What works most for me about “An Offering of Grief,” which is the track you can play above if you haven’t yet, is that it matches blow for blow with 40 Watt Sun as regards emotionality, but marries that side of doom with thickened, almost specifically American modern doom tonality. The spaced-out nooding after the 5:20 mark as well is bizarrely intricate, and it speaks to the individuality of the album as a whole, into which I’m looking forward to digging deeper.

That’s a while off, yet. This coming week, I’ll have reviews of the new live Rotor and several other albums, as well as new music from Lantlôs and (I hope) my interview with Eric Wagner, formerly of Trouble and currently of Blackfinger, as well as the returned Six Dumb Questions with German stoner rockers Wight, who, if you didn’t catch it yet, were also featured in the latest podcast, which went up yesterday. I downloaded the six-hour version today at work, and have been making my way through it ever since. So far, if I do say so myself, it rules.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Saint Vitus-centric interview with Tony Reed is definitely worth a look, and a special thanks to everyone who checked out and commented on the several live reviews this week and the 290 people so far who liked the Top 20 of 2011 post. I can’t wait to compile the results of everyone’s lists and get that up, but I guess we have a couple weeks. Thanks also to everyone who has submitted a list already. If you haven’t the link is above or in the sidebar.

Good stuff. Thanks for checking in this week, either way. Hope you have a great and safe weekend leading up to the holidays this coming week, and I hope to see you on the forum and back here Monday for more silliness.

This came in on the PR wire:

The Atlas Moth have released the album of their careers with An Ache for the Distance, their Profound Lore debut, and Batillus kicked off the year in rare form with their visceral effort Furnace. These bands are undoubtedly some of the most ferocious in today’s metal scene and now they have joined forces for a tour that is sure to leave your city devastated this fall. Joined by Kowloon Walled City, the trek will be one of the most impressive live attacks of the year and you will not want to miss the epic performances of this trio.

The Atlas Moth, Batillus & Kowloon Walled City:
11/09 Minneapolis, MN 7th Street Entry NO KWC
11/10 Fargo, ND The New Direction NO KWC
11/12 Portland, OR East End No Batillus
11/13 Seattle, WA Highline No Batillus
11/14 Boise, ID The Shredder No Batillus
11/15 Las Vegas, NV Yayo Tacos No Batillus
11/16 Phoenix, AZ Yucca Tap Room No Batillus
11/17 Capistrano Beach, CA Coconuts 
11/18 Los Angeles, CA Bow & Sparrow 
11/19 San Francisco, CA Hemlock Tavern No Batillus
11/20 Salt Lake City, UT Burt’s Tiki Lounge NO KWC
11/21 Denver, CO Moe’s NO KWC
11/22 Kansas City, MO Riot Room NO KWC
11/23 Chicago, IL Subterranean NO KWC

Batillus Off Dates:
10/26 Brooklyn, NY Acheron w/ Inter Arma, Belus
11/07 Indianapolis, IN The Vollrath w/ Late August, Chinaski
11/08 Madison, WI Wisco
11/12 Seattle, WA Highline w/ Natür
11/13 Portland, OR The Know w/ Diesto, Natür
11/15 Eugene, OR or Chico, CA TBA
11/16 San Francisco, CA Elbo Room w/ Prizehog
11/19 Las Vegas, NV Yayo Taco

The above clip of trad doomers Apostle of Solitude playing the ultra-melancholy “December Drives Me to Tears” from their 2010 album Last Sunrise was filmed by Steve Janiak of fellow Indianapolis rockers Devil to Pay and mixed with audio captured by Michael Lindenauer, a noted taper who also happens to manage Iron Man. Pretty good draw for Apostle of Solitude there, and like they were at SHoD (where both Lindenauer and Janiak also put in an appearance; the latter on guitar), they’re spot on in their performance of the song.

It’s not exactly doom season yet around here — I tend to focus more on this kind of stuff when it’s cold out, and I’ve got the air conditioning on full blast as I type this — but it’s been awfully riff-rocky around here lately, and I thought some good doom might mix things up. Wouldn’t you know my head went right to Apostle of Solitude when I thought of the words “good doom.” Go figure.

Next week I’ll be posting my interview with John Garcia of Kyuss (Lives!), so look out for that. We’ll have another installment of the Orange Goblin studio update series, and the dudes in Wizard’s Beard also turned in their Six Dumb Questions emailer, so hopefully that will be up as well. Also, if all goes according to plan, reviews of Lord, Dixie Witch and others. Weedeater is playing in Brooklyn tomorrow night if you’re around. I’ve got my niece tomorrow, so I won’t be at the show, but if you go, hope it’s a blast. I think Oxbow is playing too. Heavy.

Speaking of heavy shows in Brooklyn, don’t forget that Sept. 20, The Obelisk and BrooklynVegan are teaming up to bring you a night Sept. 20 at Union Pool with three of Small Stone Records‘ finest acts: Suplecs, The Brought Low and Lo-Pan. More info on that here and here. I’ve been thinking of it as an unofficial advance party for New Yorkers ahead of the Small Stone showcase in Philly that weekend.

Wherever you end up tomorrow or beyond, I hope you have a great and safe weekend. I have some news I need to catch up on putting on the forum, so I’ll see you there and back here Monday.

And of course, that’s the point. You’re not supposed to put on Despond when you’re looking for windows-down-driving music. It’s not the soundtrack to your next sunny barbecue. Hell, I’m pretty sure if you played “Open Veins to a Curtain Closed,” which follows a brief spoken/guitar intro – also depressing – on a sunny day, even the sun would want to kill itself. I’m exaggerating the point, but guitarist/vocalist Mike Meacham’s low-gurgling death growl sits atop riffing so melancholic and slow that if you don’t ask yourself what the point of living is at least once over the course of the album, you might be a sociopath. There are breaks periodically from the titanic undulating of the guitar, but they offer little respite in terms of mood when, in the case of “Open Veins to a Curtain Closed,” they lead to a black metal-esque faster section, playing one side of the genre off another. Loss’ darkness is complete, and though it’s titled like a punk song, “Cut Up, Depressed and Alone” takes the striking lead lines of earlier Opeth and infects them with a bleakness that almost makes you forget the song is mid-paced and not the same grueling speed as its predecessor. As Despond progresses, it’s not so much engaging as it is overwhelming. Meacham – joined by guitarist Tim Lewis, bassist John Anderson and drummer Jay LeMaire – sticks to his growling even in the quiet part of “Cut Up, Depressed and Alone,” and the effect on the listener is the same as ever. Painful.

“Deprived of the Void” is three minutes of ultra-distorted noise that serves as a lead-in for “An Ill Body Seats My Sinking Sight,” which at 7:43 follows a similar course to some of the earlier material but features more prominent drumming from LeMaire. The tonal thickness purveyed by Anderson, Lewis and Meacham should go without saying in this genre, but as Despond progresses, the encompassing tonal weight of it plays a huge part in carrying across the emotional affect. “An Ill Body Seats My Sinking Sight” doesn’t take the same kind of break as a song like “Open Veins to a Curtain Closed,” which approaches the musing air of ‘90s European death/doom while also cutting out all the dramatic elements thereof, instead slowing to a crashing pace that would do Buried at Sea proud. As “Despond” opens the second half of the record, the temptation sinks in to take Loss in pieces, to break it up into multiple sessions, but I think that’s a testament to the band having accomplished what they set out to do. Despond isn’t supposed to be easy to listen to. It’s supposed to be hard, and miserable. Life is hard and miserable. If you want escapism, go listen to whatever pretty girl the pop overlords are exploiting this week. “Shallow Pulse,” which returns Despond to its woeful course has subtle pulsations from Anderson underlying the riffing of Lewis and Meacham. They stay deep in the mix, but show something of an experimental edge to Loss they haven’t yet displayed. Easy to miss the first time around, but interesting enough to keep an ear out for.

By now Loss have made their mission readily apparent. They’re out to make the most mournful, crushing album possible. The album’s last 25 minutes, then, can’t really do anything but build on that, beginning with the cumbersomely-titled “Conceptual Funeralism unto the Final Act (of Being).” I don’t know how many riffs the song actually has, but it breaks into halves, right around its midpoint (an appropriate place to break something in half), and gradually introduces a section of chanting vocals from Lewis behind Meacham’s growling, but like everything else in our pitiful lives, this too is fleeting, and “Conceptual Funeralism unto the Final Act (of Being)” lumbers deeper into the abyss in its final moments, leading to “Silent and Completely Overcome.” The aforementioned clean vocals, courtesy of Brett Campbell (Pallbearer), fittingly start the proceedings with “I do not remember a depression such as this.” Campbell leads the way through the opening movement, and Meacham joins soon with the lines, “With bleeding wrists and dying eyes/We should be grateful for pain/For it means we have at least one feeling left.” The song soon breaks into a more driving movement, Anderson using a running bass line to add activity to LeMaire’s drumming, so that it’s not such a drastic shift when the latter switches to blastbeats for a black metal excursion reminiscent of that earlier on Despond but ultimately better done. Campbell’s vocals return to top the fadeout after another three minutes or so of megadoom, and closer “The Irreparable Act” hinges on the regretful atmosphere the title suggests.

I’m reminded in the very first lines of the song of Amorphis’ title-track from their Tuonela record, but that’s bound to be coincidence, and Loss soon progress away from it. The guitar begins solo and gradually bass swells are worked in, but “The Irreparable Act” is almost halfway through by the time LeMaire kicks in on the drums, which sound more echoey and further back than anywhere else on the album. That adds an epic feel, but the drums don’t stick around. The guitars continue their run and an organ is brought on with some softly spoken vocals, and gradually, synth chanting rises in the mix as the guitars go away and closes the album. It’s brutal. Positively brutal. Loss’ Despond succeeds because it is so fixed in its sorrow, and because there’s nothing along the course of the record either sonically or atmospherically that detracts from it. It’s the kind of album that feels like it’s filling your lungs while you listen, and naturally that’s not something that’ll appeal to everyone, but for those who can relate or for whom the theatricality in other death/doom is too much, it should find the sympathy it seems to so badly need.

Loss’ website

Profound Lore

I assume because Kung Fu Necktie is in a residential neighborhood and they’ve had noise complaints, the show had an 11PM curfew. When irono-post-punkers Psychic Teens finished at 9PM or so and neither Dark Castle nor YOB were to be found in the venue, it was immediately apparent something was up. As it turned out, they’d been stuck for however long in traffic coming from their Canadian show the night before. They were rushing to get to Philly, but for the crowd standing there, we didn’t know if or when they’d arrive.

And if they’d canceled the show, saying that they wouldn’t have enough time to play and get done by the curfew, well, shit happens, that’s life. But they didn’t. YOB and Dark Castle rolled in a bit after 9:45, immediately set up their gear and got to work kicking ass. Even Rob Shaffer — Dark Castle‘s drummer pulling double-duty filling in for Travis Foster in YOB — breaking his bass drum pedal didn’t curb the momentum. Curfew was extended till 11:30PM, YOB got to play four songs in 40 minutes, and peace and doom reigned in the City of Brotherly Love.

What was most striking about it, though — aside from the fact that they did it — was that before their set started, YOB guitarist, vocalist, principle songwriter and, on this tour, sole founding member Mike Scheidt told the crowd, “We’ve got 40 minutes and we’re going to give it everything we have. We are YOB” (or something thereabouts), before launching into the most righteous rendition of “Quantum Mystic” from 2005′s The Unreal Never Lived that I’ve ever heard. By the time they finished playing, the delay didn’t matter, the lost songs didn’t matter. There was nothing that was going to stop that crowd from loving every minute of YOB‘s performance. Damn what could have been, we were there for what was, and Scheidt, Shaffer and bassist Aaron Reiseberg kept true to his word.

YOB‘s second album for Profound Lore, called Atma, will see release Aug. 16. The record, as Scheidt explains in the interview to follow, takes its name from the spiritual concept of the self as being a part of an underlying current of selves, all joined in one essential experience. Where Western tradition has gummed this into theistic dogma, the notion of “atma” is more obscure and thus even more universal: The self as connection to everything around it. As I stood in Kung Fu Necktie and watched the crowd around me get absorbed into Atma opener “Prepare the Ground,” it was hard not to feel some understanding of what Scheidt was talking about. They were transcendentally heavy.

We spoke at the beginning of the tour, via phone, as the two bands ran errands in Iowa, and I’ll say flat out it’s the best interview I’ve done in a long time. The guitarist’s openness, honesty and genuine nature is apparent in his every answer, and his discussion late in the conversation of the nature of ambition and how it relates to YOB presents an awareness of perspective that, much like his musical approach, is entirely his own.

I won’t delay it further. Please find enclosed the 5,700-word Q&A transcription of my interview with Mike Scheidt of YOB, and enjoy.

…The album sounds really raw.

I was thinking about my favorite records, my all-time doom records are just kind of punchy records. I think of Art of Self-Defense, Forest of Equilibrium, Holy Mountain and Through Silver in Blood, which are all, from those bands, not necessarily their best-sounding records, production-wise, but they’re their most visceral records and just have so much grainyness and grit, and I just really wanted that kind of production for this record. It seemed like it fit the songs, so it’s what we were going for.

How’s the tour going? You’re in Iowa?

Yes, we are in Iowa. We’re good. We’re just doing some business right now. Actually, we’re going around and hitting banks and post offices and various things, trying to get things rolling, trying to stay on top of it at home, but the tour has been really positive so far. We’ve been having a really good time.

Have you been able to get a sense of how the new material is going over live?

It’s been really good. Every time we play out new material, it always has a very similar effect, where people definitely rock hard, I guess, in the crowd, but they also are really paying attention. “Prepare the Ground” is definitely just a basher, so I think it instantly has this swinging groove that might be familiar to YOB and our heroes, so it’s definitely really great, but “Atma,” you can see people really trying to figure it out. There’s heads banging, because it has that 4/4 bash, but it is really weird and backwards and there’s a lot of strange timings within that steady flow. It seems incredibly positive.

Yeah, I guess you have those hits during the triplet part. I can see where it would be hard to keep up with.

Yeah, and it’s just so metal though. Fists were in the air when it’s the triplets by itself, for example. There’s dudes going, “Yeaahhh!” and so forth, because it is so metal. And I wanted that for that song. I wanted this heavy, exotic, backwards, triplet-based, slow with some big piece in it that was just the anthem part where it felt like the top of the mountain or something. Top of the metallic mountain.

Do you have that sample live?

No. I wish we did, but we don’t. It doesn’t seem to matter. People are down.

Do you have a sense of the anticipation for the album?

It seems like there’s a lot of people who are interested in it. I live kind of in a fishbowl universe in Eugene, where it’s just a lot of work and a lot of raising kids, and so recording the record and sending it out there, we definitely know we have our people out there, our tribe, that want to hear what we’re doing, and there was definitely a lot of interest around the underground, but as far as what people are gonna think of the record or if it’s gonna make us grow as a band, I have no idea. I hardly think about it. It’s not up to us, and almost none of our business, so I just let it go. It’s what we had in us at the time, and it’s what we got.

The very first thing on the record, someone’s yelling. Is that you?

Yeah.

It’s real low. What are you saying?

I’m probably just yelling out something. It might have been a count, or it might have been – we had a lot of fun in the studio – it might have just been screaming as we’re getting ready to go. There was a lot of energy in the studio. We were really into it and really into recording and really into the songs and really just pumped up.

How much did you record live?

The guitar, drums and bass live, and there’s room mics and stuff like that, so any amount of noise that we’re gonna make is gonna be heard, so no regard for room mics whatsoever. We were just going for it.

Was the rawer production sound something you specifically wanted to push after doing The Great Cessation?

No, it just felt like what the songs were requiring. I just wanted to hear a record like my favorite records that was a YOB record. When you look at Elaborations of Carbon maybe or Catharsis, those are pretty raw recordings too, but we’re just such a better band now than we were then, and so, to approach the record with a total analog darkness and chewiness and have that kind of raw – listening to a lot of Poison Idea – feel, I just really wanted that in our record. It felt the best. Maybe the next record will be retarded polished and we’ll hire Bob Rock or something (laughs), but this one, we just wanted it to be brutal and complex.

I don’t have a lyric sheet, but it seems like some of the songs could bleed into each other lyrically. Can you discuss the themes of Atma?

Certainly the theme has always been the sort of mystic, Eastern thought bent, more or less, from the perspective of somebody trying to stagger their way through it, versus it being some real clean and polished version of spirituality. I think with Atma, the actual term “atma,” you get a sense of it from the sample, but the Eastern version of it means self as in our individual sense, self as in our higher self, but really, it also means self as in, in one moment, every single living, breathing, vibrating, growing, stagnant, whatever, thing. In one moment, taking one breath or whatever it is, together at once, where there truly is this giant underlying current of seamless wholeness that is not good, not evil, not letting us do whatever we want. It doesn’t take sides, it’s just one giant whole thing that every eyeball sees through, every ear hears, every mouth tastes. It’s all the same moment. That’s before any thought. That’s before any concept. That’s before any religion, any politics. It’s all just the ground from which it all happens. For whatever reason, that hit me as a very profound theme, and I think the album definitely is from a perspective of a human mind trying to relate to a concept like that, but really, I’m very stoked on that concept. I like it. I live the concept.

Couldn’t just go with a self-titled, huh?

Nope. And that was thrown around too, “Well, we don’t have a record called YOB,” but no.

At this point, do you have something that’s a definitive YOB sound? You said before that “Prepare the Ground” is a basher in the YOB sense, and I think that’s very true, but what does that mean for you?

It means equal parts having a recognizable sound that is ours and not deviating too far from it – we’ve had a certain sound that’s been based on our own musings, my own weird guitar style and certainly the influences of our record collection – but also, every album, and I think part of what YOB is as a sound too, brings some new element that the record before it didn’t have. It brings in a new twist or a new vibe that also is us. That becomes the new us, but without ever abandoning what it is that we do. It’s very important to me that as soon as the first song hits, that it’s instantly like, “Wow, okay. This is the new YOB, and it already hits me differently, but it sounds like YOB.” I don’t ever want to be in a place where somebody grabs one of our records and goes, “Yup, sounds like Slayer. It’s another Slayer record.” Because that’s how I feel about Slayer. I love Slayer, but I think their best albums are many years behind. There’s always one or two great songs on each record, and they’ve never abandoned their sound, and to that I’ll throw them the horns forever, but I also want each record to be a challenge in itself, or have something on it that’s really challenging to a listener or to our fans.

Other than the production, which we talked about, what are some of the elements of growth that you tried to bring into Atma?

Some more complex timings and riff structures. I really pushed myself hard on my vocals. I wanted the most dynamic range of singing I could possibly have, that I had in me, and I really spent a lot of time with that. We spent a lot more time with samples and noise and textures like that. I wanted a very deep record, that on headphones would yield new stuff, that maybe you didn’t notice while blaring even in your face, or in a show, or on a stereo, but then you put on your headphones and go, “Oh, there’s a whole bunch more going on here.” I think I wanted styles of riffs that were recognizable to us, but had twists in them that were also new, which I guess also falls into the timings and swing. So yeah, there’s a lot of that. Just a lot of exploration that felt really great. And also too, to bring in Scott Kelly, which is also a growth for us – we’ve never had a guest performer before – so our sixth record, we bring somebody in, and he brings something new to the table and also collaborate with somebody we respect a lot. I think all of that makes for, “Wow, okay, this is really a new album.”

Your having Scott on the record was kind of a surprise for me. After five albums, you don’t see that kind of thing coming, but damned if it doesn’t work. That part in “Before We Dreamed of Two” is killer.

He stunned us, man. We wanted some Tribes of Neurot/Through Silver in Blood-style percussion, and we definitely got that from him. Over the years, Scott and I – it’s not like we talk a lot, but we definitely are friends. We have a lot in common and definitely enjoy each other’s company whenever we are hanging out. We were invited to do the two Neurosis shows around New Year’s Eve, and I saw them do their tribal drum circle onstage and thought, “Man, maybe Scott’ll do that on our record.” So I asked him and he was way into it. We brought him into Eugene – he doesn’t live too far from there – and we were having a great time hanging out. We set up drums for him and he did his parts, and it was killer, and kind of in a very last-minute thing, “Maybe you could sing too,” and (laughs), and he was like, “Yeah…” He wasn’t sure if he wanted to at first, and he was like, “Man, I hear you’re doing some really off the wall and cool stuff, and I don’t want to get in the way of that,” but then we talked about it some more and found the perfect spot on the album. He just sat down, and in about 15 minutes, he wrote out his part. He wrote out his own lyrics, and we set up the mic for him, and he’s out there mic-checking and we’re all in the control room talking and laughing, and doing what you do, and then he started singing. It got real quiet. We’re just like, “Wow.” It was a revelation in that moment that, this guys we’ve been listening to for 20 years and have on the highest pedestal, was singing. In the next room. On our record. It’s like, “Yeah, Scott Kelly’s on our record,” but in that moment, the gravity of that for us personally hit, and we’re just like, “Holy shit.” He did an amazing, amazing job, and we talked about having me sing with him, and so I just did some backup things with him, harmonies, and sang a couple lines with him, definitely not trying to get in the way of his power and what he was doing, and he loved what we came up with, and so did we. We’re just both really thrilled with it.

I can imagine that nerd awe.

Oh yeah, you know? And he’s the best kind of hero to have. He’s such a great man, and he’s so wise, but so kicked back, so humble. He was just so easy to be around, and work with. It wasn’t like bringing in some really famous person – which he is – and having a number of demands or whatever, which we would have met. We wanted to work with him. But it wasn’t that. It was just another person from the whole tribe of the heavy there to record a record, and he really wanted to be there. It was just the best. It was the best experience. He and I definitely very much see eye to eye on how to do things in the studio, so it was just flawless, fun, creation. Not flawless in the sense of everything being perfect, but flawless in the flow. We were both in our element and had such a good time. And he has that billion-year-old-sounding voice. So when you hear ocean in the background and crashing waves, this giant mass of life and energy that’s been hitting rocks for millions of years, that’s what his voice sounds like to me. It’s just amazing.

Were you tempted at all to make “Before We Dreamed of Two” the last song on the record and end with that? It’s also the longest song on the album.

Yeah, and it totally would’ve worked as the last tune. I guess I had a little bit of a different vision from our normal mold of how we do records. I thought that’s a great middle piece, and it’s really heavy and powerful, and then bring in something that’s a little more weird and decrepit, like “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore,” and then end on a more triumphant note. Something that started out like the typical YOB ballad that we do on each record, with a lot of beautiful quiet guitar stuff – at least that’s what we’re shooting for – but then it rises to something that’s kind of higher pace, but really tribal and driven, and having it then open up to a lot of very spacious guitar hammer-ons and then getting really heavy at the end and fading out. It just seemed like, “Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s do something different for the last song and have it end on a higher energy note, versus the epic, gets really quiet and really slow note.”

Did you know you wanted “Adrift in the Ocean” to do those things when you were writing it?

Definitely as I was writing it, I knew it was gonna be… Out of all the songs on there, that’s probably the one I spent the most time on. I typically don’t like working on songs too hard. I feel like if there’s too much work, then it’s just not really happening. I think any kind of songwriter will reach a certain level of playing where what you do is ingrained, and you understand what you’re doing, and maybe you’re trying to learn a new trick, but what you do is already somewhat established, and if I have to try repeatedly to make something flow, then it just doesn’t flow. It’s real simple. “Okay, I’m gonna put that on the back burner and maybe someday I’ll pick it up again and it’s gonna instantly have that twist that I wasn’t thinking of that’ll make it work.” We don’t spend a ton of time in the studio trying to hammer out ideas. Either the idea’s there or it isn’t. That being said, each piece of that song, I really liked a lot, and it took me a little while to figure out how it was gonna all come together. I liked the song and the feel enough where it was worth it in this particular instance, worth the wait to me to see how it was gonna unfold, and it ended up being really, really wonderful. I really like listening to it. I think it turned out great and has a lot of almost classic YOB in it, almost Elaborations of Carbon-esque moments, and I actually really enjoy that. I really like that, on this record, we pushed ourselves sonically, but that we also kept kind of a punk feel, like when we were first writing YOB riffs, and being so pumped and excited and just, “Riff, riff, riff! Let’s riff!” That’s how it feels to me, at least, from my own personal experience.

It’s funny to hear you talk about having your songwriting patterns down, because I think that comes across on the album, but I don’t know exactly how. It sounds like a record where you know what YOB sounds like. It’s established in that way.

For better or for worse, yeah, I have a pretty good idea of how I’m gonna approach a YOB record, at least stylistically, and what I like to hear and what I want to hear and what I want to bring to it that makes me feel good and that also I feel like hopefully a worthy contribution to my peers that are also out there making music. My hope is to give something to our fans that they will grow to love. That’s our hope. I hope also that for our peers and our friends in bands, they can listen to it and go, “Wow, yeah, okay. That’s different than what I would have done,” and we can continue to all inspire each other. But yeah, there is a way that I’ve learned how to write songs over the years that just feels like home, and if I was gonna be in another band that would be doom metal, my influence would be all over it – obviously Age Eternal would be an example of that – but it’s gonna be different, because I wouldn’t approach it like a YOB record. When I’m gonna record a YOB record, there’s a way that I’m always gonna approach it that will be, I think, fairly consistent.

And in terms of “Adrift in the Ocean,” something about that quiet opening and the riff at the end bookending the track struck me as really interesting, the structure there. How was that all pieced together? You said it was all sporadic parts. How did you decide what went where?

You know, it didn’t come together part-by-part, and the intro I had pretty nailed down. It was everything else that was up for grabs. I had a few A, B and C selections for where to take the song. I worked on that for a while, let it go and come back, let it go and come back, and I guess about three weeks into the process of getting ready to record, it just all came together. One night, I just had the inspiration and wrote the rest of it, basically the last 10 minutes of the album in an evening. Brought it to practice, and finally everything gelled. It was instantly awesome, the band was instantly stoked on it, we were all 100 percent jamming and flowing and having a killer time, and that’s the requirement. If the three of us are like, “Yes! That fucking rules, let’s play it again,” then we nailed it. If we love it, someone else is gonna find something in it to like.

Can you talk about Stevie’s art that’s the front cover. All the YOB covers are so different, and this one’s really striking.

Oh yeah. On the internet, we found this photo, this incredible photo that was evidently, we found out, a fake. But we found this incredible thing with mountains in the background and water and a crescent moon that was reflected in the water, and it was just so incredible. It would’ve cost us a lot of money to get that photo, but initially we were like, “Well, maybe we can do a crazy photo like that.” And when Stevie heard us starting to talk about this, she’s like, “What the hell are you talking about? You’re gonna use stock photos for a YOB record? You can’t do that!” We’re already talking with our dear friend Aaron Edge about doing artwork, and we’re looking at lots of different photos and how we could put them together, and Stevie’s like, “Let me just paint it. Let me paint what you want,” and I’m like, “Here’s this photo, do your thing with it,” and in two days (laughs) – two days – she painted that, and we’re just like, “Uh, yeah, that’s totally it.” And that’s our album cover. She is amazing. Have you seen the layouts for the new Dark Castle? Wait till you see the vinyl. The CD is fucking amazing too, but she has quite a talent. Quite a talent.

Doing this tour, are you starting to think of YOB as more of a touring band?

No. YOB hasn’t toured in six years. We’ve definitely been busy in the sense that in the last year or so we definitely stepped up and did a lot of crazy shit we never did before, fly-out gigs, and we’re always constantly perplexed and joking around about it, like, “Wow, really? They’re flying us here? We gotta be good. People are flying us.” Not that we ever thing we’re not gonna be, but it’s this element we’ve never dealt with before. It’s been crazy. But really, as far as touring goes, this just felt like the time. It just felt like a good time to do it, so we did a lot of research and put a lot of feelers out there, and talked with our booking agent over it really carefully – and he’s been advocating this for a long time, saying, “I promise you it’ll go really well” – and I’m very, very cautious when it comes to things like that. I don’t like making assumptions, and I want to make sure things are really going to be good, in the sense that we’ll have solid shows. We’re in different places in our lives. We have kids. We have jobs, and bills that are pressing. These are things that are important, and we’ve always felt like our art has really come out of having a priority on our lives outside of art, and bringing that into our art. Definitely I’m an artist, but I’m also a father and it’s a role I take very seriously, and I’m not just gonna go out on the road and get out there and party and have some thrills at their expense. It’s kind of a combination of a lot of things. I love playing live and I love to be out on the road, and [this is] the first time we looked at everything and said, “Wow, maybe we can go out and do this and have it support us for the time we’re doing it.” We rigged it up so we can get our jobs back when we got home, and a lot of things came together where it was like, “This could be a really good time for us to do it,” and on top of that, the band itself, and the genre really growing. It seemed like right now, our kind of music, this style of music, is very visible, and we want to say and feel that we could be out there, participate in a time when the music is really vital. We can contribute records. We can do that for many, many years, and that’s awesome, but this is a really exciting time, and we just want to be a part of that. On top of that, we also have a lot of fans that have supported us throughout the years, and it’s been very, very positive in our experience, an integral part. I really felt like, especially going to Roadburn and meeting international fans for the first time face-to-face outside of when they’ve been in the US for festivals or whatnot, it struck me that we owed them something. We owed them a trip. We may not make trips every year, but we owe some people at least one full trip to Europe, and to be able to connect with them on a personal level in a room, versus their stereo. It’s a lot of things all at once that culminated into this tour happening, but as far as us being a “touring band,” this may be our last tour. I really don’t have goals, and I don’t think of the future. When it comes to this music, I have no goals. None. My only goal right now is to pay my electric bill and rent and child support on the road. That’s the long-term part. The short-term part is making friends every night and having a sense of reality and a sense of community at our shows and being a part of that community and doing whatever we can for our part to create that feeling for the people that show up. It’s kind of cliché to say, but it’s really true for us. We’re not just a band on stage and they’re people in the crowd. We are an environment, and when all those people come together, it creates an environment, and we want it to be the best, raddest, kickass, comfortable, supportive, cathartic experience that it can be for everybody there.

How do you feel YOB has developed as a live act, then?

We’re better than we’ve ever been. There’s a level of comfort on stage that’s just real natural. We’ve very genuine people, so high-fivin’ and shakin’ hands with people and just being very connected to them is real easy. It’s very easy for us, very natural. People don’t feel excluded from what we’re doing on stage, they feel included. We’re not just lost in our own trip. There are moments where we are, but we always bring people into it. I think that’s really important. I think also we’re just a lot better on our instruments. I’m a better singer than I’ve been. I have a lot more consistent technique and things to help me get through. I just feel very hooked into what it is that I do as a guitar player. Just speaking for myself, everybody makes mistakes, but any mistake that I make, I’m never like, “Fuck.” I never have that feeling. It’s always just smiling and smile at the crowd and be like, “Hey, it’s live, here we go. Rock and roll.” I think that kind of ease transfers to the crowd, and the crowd never feels unsure of the band, and we never feel unsure of them. That, to me, is what makes me feel like we’re maturing as a live act.

What’s next for you after this tour?

I have no idea. Zero idea. None. Zilch. We could just have a really fun tour and that’s it, or we could write another record. I definitely have some kind of excitement around writing some more, so I do intuit that there’ll probably be another YOB record. Whether that becomes a touring situation or whatnot, I don’t know. I feel like it’s not really up to us. There are a lot of bands out there writing music, and a lot of bands out there pouring their heart and soul into things, and some bands get supported and some don’t. There are bands out there that work very hard to make a living playing music, and they stay on the road a lot, and I think sometimes that’s really great. Sometimes I think bands start to suffer for it. Their art starts to suffer from being on the road too much. They start to write records that feel like products to me, versus being living, breathing documents of a time. It starts to feel like a means to stay out there and do it. I’ll never write a record from that perspective. I understand why people do it, and it’s not a judgment or a critique, it’s just a statement of intent that, for us, it’s the music and the art first, and then, if there is support out there that is outside of us that is like, “No, we really want you out here, what can we do to make that happen?” then we’re gonna do it. If there are people out there to make it happen and the record does really well and the art begs that kind of response… I think that’s really what it is. I don’t ever want to feel like we’re out there forcing ourselves on people who are like, “Oh, they’re coming through a third time this year, a fourth time this year. Really?” There’s some bands out there that can do that, I just never assumed we’re one of them. I just assume that, “Here we are, we’re in your town once. If you want to come see us, killer. If you don’t, great, then we’re not commanding that for you, and that’s our truth center of where we really sit in the universe, and we don’t need to get high on our horse about who we are and who we’re not.” Music first. Everything else takes care of itself. I try to stay out of the way, and with this tour in particular, the demand seemed solid enough for us to go out there and do it and have a rad, fun tour that’s adult, where we can eat and sleep in a nice bed if we want, and we can go hang out if we want. That way we can bring what it is that we really are to the stage every night, rather than just by the skin of our teeth where we have some kind of goal that, if we do this, we’re going to get “somewhere.” That’s just not a concept that I relate to or that I want to bring into our music.

I think a lot of people aimlessly go for a thing and don’t know what the thing is they’re going for.

Or they get it, and they realize it’s really a lot of fucking hard work and they start to get burnt out on it. Or they start to get home and not even want to look at their guitar anymore. “I need to not play guitar for three months,” or whatever. And that’s cool, I have phases up and down, but the path is where it’s at and the goal just constantly evolves. Just speaking for YOB, in order for us to write truly quality records, we can’t be thinking about ambition. We can think about ambition in songwriting. We can think about ambition in a studio sound, what we want to achieve in a recording. But as far as to try to “succeed” or to try to become more well known, or “bigger,” those concepts often ruin bands or make bands just have that ever so slight taste of industry versus art. It’s okay, nothing wrong with it. That’s not our path.

I guess you avoid a lot of trouble knowing that.

Yeah, and stretching too thin. I’m just not wired for that. If that came our way, just very naturally and legitimately, and someone really supported YOB to do our vision and not try to make us into cellphone ringtones and shit like that, you know, I would consider it. Of course we would. It’s like everything that has every happened for YOB, where we’ve become “bigger” in spite of ourselves, because we really haven’t worked as hard as a lot of other bands have as far as to be a name out there. We just do what we do, and we’ve stepped up to opportunities. We look at each individual thing and go, “Do we want to do this. What are the plusses and the negatives? Go!” and we look and it and we decide if it’s gonna work for us or not. We’re out here doing this big tour with Dark Castle. We want to be here and we want to be with Dark Castle. We’ve turned down bigger tours. We’ve turned down package tours. We’ve turned down tours to get into a “bigger market” because we want to play with bands we love. We want to watch a band every night that we love and respect, and we don’t want to deal with any other kind of bullshit. We don’t want to deal with anybody’s huge egos and giant touring bands. We want to have a great time and we want to connect to our fans and we want it to be personal. I like playing to a crowd that maybe, sometimes, isn’t prepared for us. That always happens sometimes. But I really love playing for crowds that, even if there’s only 50 people, they know why they’re there, they’re there to see this particular thing. Those are the most satisfying shows to me. There are shows that we’re gonna play on this tour that are bigger shows and have a lot of press around them, and I’m sure we’ll bring in people that’ve never seen us before or are new to us. That’s great too. I’m never gonna turn away new fans. That’s not it. It’s more just it’s really important to me that people find us for the right reasons. Not because of a picture or an image that’s put out there to try to bring people in. Our image comes from within us, and so our flavor and our imagery comes from within. It’s not something concocted to bring people to us, it’s for people to find and resonate with. And if they find it and resonate with it, then they’re gonna find something in it they’re gonna like. We want that personal connection. Otherwise you’re just a flavor of the month, and we have no say in whether we’re a flavor of the month or not, but I know that in our hearts, what we’re doing is based on our real, true selves.

YOB on Thee Facebooks

Profound Lore

Hard to know what to say about this kind of night without getting bogged down in hyperbole, because even the next afternoon, I still feel charged up from it — and while we’re talking about after effects, my ears are also still ringing (or at least the left one; the right doesn’t so much do that anymore) — but it was like everything came together. Dark Castle have already released one of 2011′s most complex albums, and YOB‘s Atma has yet to leave my CD player since going in. Both bands have an obvious and spiritual connection to their music, and last night, it was like they stood on stage and held their arms out and invited everyone else in. Who wouldn’t go?

Le Poisson Rouge is a medium-size room. Not a bar (though there is one), but not a bigger venue. Short ceiling, but I knew from seeing Shrinebuilder there in 2009 that that would only mean the sound had no choice but to pummel your skull. I’d never seen Dark Castle before, which is kind of hard to believe considering how much they tour, but I knew enough from hearing Surrender to all Life Beyond Form that I didn’t want to miss them now. Following a sushi dinner with The Patient Mrs., I made my way to Bleecker and got in a bit before they went on.

One thing about Dark Castle — and I consider it an admirable thing about them — is it’s just the two of them on stage. The recently-interviewed Stevie Floyd on guitar and vocals and double-duty trooper of the night Rob Shaffer on drums. Where on Surrender to all Life Beyond Form, the songs are filled out by the synth/Moog/noise contributions of producer Sanford Parker and several guest vocalists, including YOB‘s own Mike Scheidt, that kind of thing just can’t be replicated in a live setting without excessive sampling or time spent in front of a laptop and not actually playing the songs.

I won’t say one approach is better or worse than the other, because when it came down to the material itself last night, Dark Castle killed it. The sound may not have been as full as on the record, but “Surrender to all Life Beyond Form” was one of the highlights of the show, and the rawer feel was a big part of why. That Floyd and Shaffer would be on the same page in their presence isn’t necessarily surprising — because, again, they tour all the time — but the power in their delivery was readily apparent and picked up most if not all of the slack in the noise department. Even without YOB following, it would have been well worth the trip for their set alone.

But YOB was following, and having seen them before at the Planet Caravan fest in North Carolina, I had some idea of what to expect. I parked myself up front while they were setting up and stayed there for most of their show, which — and I say this with all the nerdy glee I can muster — was amazing. It’s not that you listen to those records and think to yourself, “Wow, I bet this band sucks live,” but until you actually see it, until you actually feel the rumble of Scheidt‘s guitar and of Aaron Reiseberg‘s bass. Scheidt played with a full stack of Emperor cabs behind him and neither Reiseberg nor Shaffer (filling the role of Travis Foster for the tour) were lacking in volume or presence. It being YOB‘s first time in New York in more than half a decade — oh, the story I could tell you about the show they did at the Pyramid way back when — as a fan, I wanted everything to sound perfect, and it did.

They opened with “Quantum Mystic” from The Unreal Never Lived, an album the influence of which is only beginning to be felt six years after its release. Immediately, the crowd was on board, fists were raised, toasts were made, and heads — including my own — banged with abandon for the neck stiffness that might ensue this morning. I pulled my earplugs out. Worth it. “Quantum Mystic” led into “Prepare the Ground,” the opener from Atma, and that in turn to “Burning the Altar” from 2009′s The Great Cessation. One imagines that with a couple more albums under their belt, YOB will be able to do a full set of nothing but the killer tracks they start their records with. Certainly it was a welcome opening trio and a half-hour well spent. The crowd pressed and shifted and stumbled and loved it and I did likewise. I haven’t seen a set with that kind of impact since Neurosis at Roadburn.

Their ethereal space elements showed up in “The Great Cessation,” the titular closer of the album, which followed Atma‘s title cut — a little more complicated than the opener and thus not as immediately grasped by the audience who doesn’t have the record yet — and YOB shifted the tone of the show from planetary aural crush to dark matter drift. That album was my favorite of 2009, but I still feel like I got a new appreciation for “The Great Cessation” hearing it live. Reiseberg and Shaffer ran into some trouble during one of its drawn-out, patient instrumental passages, but were able to recovery swiftly enough. I don’t think anyone was about to complain, anyway.

For a finale, Scheidt called Floyd up to the stage for a scathing rendition of “Grasping Air” from The Unreal Never Lived, and (if I remember correctly; I might have this order wrong and if I do, I hope someone will correct me) rounded out the night with “Ball of Molten Lead” from 2004′s The Illusion of Motion. Considering the mass of pulp that YOB had by then beaten Le Poisson Rouge into, I can’t think of a more fitting conclusion. Like the rest of the show, I was just really, really glad to have been there to see it.

It’s a rare performance that pulls you out of everything else, that commands not only full attention, but a kind of dedication to it. When YOB finished, I felt like I’d been to the end of the universe and back. I don’t want to make it more than it was, because what it was was enough. If you were there, you know, and if not, hopefully next time you’ll find out.

More pics after the jump. As always, click any photo to enlarge.

Dark Castle

YOB

Tonight I was supposed to go to the ball game in hopes of seeing a certain shortstop get his 3,000th hit (being a numbers guy myself, I can appreciate that), but it got rained out. My backup was to catch Sourvein and Kings Destroy in Brooklyn, but by the time I’d driven back to Jersey from The Bronx, well, I’d already driven to The Bronx and back, and Brooklyn‘s even harder to get to, so my motivation was pretty much dead. I’ve no doubt all parties will survive and the show will go/has gone on despite my absence. If you went, I hope you had a good time. I hung around the house and failed at several endeavors in succession. Most you lose. Some you win.

I wanted to close out this week with something modern, melodically satisfying and heavy as all hell, and the 17-minute “We Can” from Grayceon‘s All We Destroy fits all those bills perfectly. In the interest of honesty, I’ll confess that I’m not listening to it as I write this — as is my usual habit — instead streaming the new Sungrazer album for the umpteenth time on the Dutch 3voor12 site, which you might recognize as being where all those Roadburn audio links lead.

Yesterday I talked with guitarist/vocalist Mike Scheidt from YOB — whose new album, Atma, was reviewed Wednesday — for about 50 minutes, from which I’ll put a Q&A together hopefully in the next week or two. The plan is to take pictures at their NYC show Tuesday and use them with the feature, but you never know, a piano might fall on my head. If one does, the interview’s done anyway. It was killer.

Next week, I’ll have a review of that show, plus new albums from Ramesses and Borgo Pass, among others. Next Friday is also the Truckfighters gig at the Cake Shop in NYC where if you tell them you read The Obelisk, you get in for free. More info on that is here, but the short version is it’s a pretty sweet deal, and I hope one you’ll take advantage of if you’re in the area. Next week I’m also going to go back and revisit the top albums list from last year and see how it holds up. That’ll be fun. Maybe just for me, but fun all the same.

Alright, now the Sungrazer‘s over and I’m listening to Grayceon. No regrets. Wherever you are, have a great and safe weekend. See you on the forum and back here Monday with a track from The Brought Low‘s new EP and other goodies.

YOB

That leaves Atma, the new follow-up to The Great Cessation and second Profound Lore offering, in a curious position. For the first time in their career, YOB are coming into an album as an established act with a widespread reputation and an expectation placed on their sound. Whether that played consciously or not into the writing process for these five tracks, I don’t know, but there exists on Atma a delicate balance of familiar elements and stylistic progressions that hints to a growing self-awareness on the part of the band.

All the more appropriate is the title, then, which refers to the Buddhist concept of the complete, spiritual self. This is lyrical ground that Scheidt – as YOB’s principal songwriter, guitarist and vocalist – has tread going back to the band’s beginnings in 2002’s Elaborations of Carbon or 2003’s Catharsis, but there’s a maturity of approach on Atma that speaks to the musical and personal growth they’ve undertaken since then. That self-awareness is pervasive, and one gets the sense from opener “Prepare the Ground” that Scheidt, who seems to pepper in grunts timed just to when the song’s several builds are paying off (the exclamation “Prepare!” at 6:43 that leads into the final movement being especially satisfying, though there’s still another “oogh” to come), and who also produced Atma, knows the effect each move the band is making will have.

What this essentially means is that the processes of figuring out how to be heavy, and of deciding what YOB should be on the most basic level, appear to be over. Atma signals the beginning of the refinement of those processes, and of their mastery.

I should say at this point (actually, I probably should have said already) that when it comes to YOB, I can’t even pretend at impartiality. I’m a fan of this band, having found them around Catharsis and nerded out at every step of their progression since then. Simply put, I think they’re one of the best acts of their generation, and I’ve long held the belief that their influence will be felt for a long time to come. One could argue it can already be seen in YOB’s peers, and Atma – the anticipation for which you could turn into bricks and build a skyscraper – has managed to meet every expectation I had for it. Scheidt’s production is (predictably) rawer than was Sanford Parker’s for The Great Cessation, but the songs here prove that YOB are unrelenting in their creative drive.

Conceptually, that’s even more respectable than the now-characteristic riffs and pulsating kick of “Prepare the Ground,” but when it comes to actually listening, it’s hard not to be engulfed by the sheer heaviness of Atma’s launch and leave all other contextual concerns behind. YOB started The Great Cessation with one of its strongest cuts as well – that being “Burning the Altar” – and “Prepare the Ground” has shades of that track in terms of methodology. From Scheidt’s contrasting growls and spacey wailing to Reiseberg’s huge-sounding low end and Foster’s groove-setting tom runs, it is YOB at their most YOBian and some of the most memorable material Atma has on offer. Beginning with a barely-audible exclamation and launching immediately into a series of chugging hits that sounds like it’s never going to end, the song gradually unfolds to a flowing monstrosity that, nonetheless, is underscored by a contemplative edge present on much of Atma – all the more fitting an opener.

Also evident in “Prepare the Ground” is an increase in melodic awareness on the part of Scheidt, and while that’s usually code for “They’re not as heavy as they used to be,” YOB avoid that trap entirely. Rather, the clean vocals of the verse and chorus complement the sway in the guitars and bass, and the song as a whole sounds that much heavier leading into the title track, which is both more lumbering musically and more tortured in its vocals. Mournful, semi-spoken cries and held chords take hold after an intro of a sampled storm, and “Atma” feels all-around more plodding than was “Prepare the Ground,” less outwardly riff-based.

That said, Atma’s title cut also has the honor of playing host to the chugging guitar triplets that have been a staple of YOB’s sound since they were so effectively put to use on The Unreal Never Lived closer, “The Mental Tyrant.” It was “Burning the Altar” on The Great Cessation, and like that song, the bass and drums drop out initially while Scheidt introduces the movement on guitar, but where “Atma” proves different is that instead of launching right into an über-groove and giving Atma an early apex, they sustain a complex pattern of off-time hits behind a sampled speech that explains the concept of atman as the spiritual self, complete self. In the song’s final moments, deathly growls lie under canned-sounding (there’s a name for that effect) vocals, providing a glimpse of YOB at their most tectonic that echoes into a couple seconds of silence before centerpiece “Before We Dreamed of Two” kicks in with an Eastern-scaled solo from Scheidt – perhaps some reciprocating influence from Dark Castle there – and more lowly-mixed samples topping one of Reiseberg’s most effective bass lines.

At 16 minutes, “Before We Dreamed of Two” is Atma’s longest track. This is a distinction usually reserved for the closer – see “The Great Cessation,” “The Mental Tyrant,” “The Illusion of Motion” from the 2004 Metal Blade debut of the same name, or the title-track from Catharsis – but the break from the pattern is welcome and more than justified by the song itself, which features one of Atma’s two guest appearances from Neurosis guitarist/vocalist Scott Kelly and is an indisputable high point of this stage in YOB’s tenure. In thinking back to the many ambient stretches that have cropped up in songs throughout their catalog, I can’t pull a match for it in terms of atmosphere, and when the build of the prior seven minutes comes to an excruciatingly slow close and the song drops to a sort of minimalist run of guitar lines, you just know something’s coming.

The first time I heard the track, and first heard Kelly’s vocals come in over that soft guitar, I literally threw a claw in the air. It’s almost too good, reminiscent of the effective break Neurosis pulled off on “To the Wind” on their most recent studio outing, 2007’s Given to the Rising (my, how time flies). Spoiler alert: at 10:09, the guitars get heavy again and Reiseberg and Foster join Scheidt and Kelly for Atma’s most triumphant riff. Gradually, the vocals return – Kelly staying more melodic than not for the most part, but still in his trademark through-the-teeth guttural style – and the whole reason I’d make the case for “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore” is the interplay between he and Scheidt, who steps into a backing role (what else to do?), adding layers for repeated lines and giving way to Kelly’s epilogue, “Distant silver shore/Bring my body/Bring my body,” which arrives over ever-slowing hits and sustained distortion noise I can just see the wavelengths of as I listen.

In the last minute of the song, there are a total of three hits over said ringing-out, including that which brings “Before We Dreamed of Two” to silence following a final declaration from Kelly (he might be saying, “It was enough,” but I don’t have the benefit of a lyric sheet to confirm that). With 34 of Atma’s 55 minutes passed, and almost half of that time dedicated to “Before We Dreamed of Two” alone, it’s hard to think back to the beginning of that song and get the full scope of the journey YOB has just rounded out. Though it’s shorter than any of their prior longest tracks – “Revolution,” the longest from Elaborations of Carbon, was 17:06 – it lacks nothing in scope, and with Kelly’s contribution, leaves an indelible stamp on the album. If ever a band earned a minute or two for an interlude, or something to let listeners catch their breath, YOB earn it here, but instead, Foster, Reiseberg and Scheidt push forward with “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore,” the shortest of Atma’s components at 7:34.

Like the opener, “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore” is YOB working within what, for them, is a straightforward approach. There are more screams than on “Prepare the Ground,” and Scheidt’s voice sounds rawer, like it had already done a bunch of work that day and was beginning to give out. Because Atma is mixed well, the effect that has is to play up the natural feel, but after “Before We Dreamed of Two,” it’s hard for “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore” not to feel like a comedown. Where a song like “Doom #2” from The Illusion of Motion, itself the shortest cut on its album, was able to feel like a genuine change because of its frenetic pacing, “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore” keeps a doomed plod not dissimilar to much of where Atma has resided, and it’s not until the death growls that top the crashing finish nearly seven minutes in that the song really distinguishes itself.

Still, one gets the impression that “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore” would work better outside of the context of Atma as a whole. That is, if I popped the album on and skipped right to track four (and forgive me, I haven’t yet), the song would have a completely different effect than it does following “Before We Dreamed of Two,” which could easily have been YOB’s sendoff to this collection. But track-order hypotheticals aside, the exhale finally comes in the introduction to closer “Adrift in the Ocean,” which begins with over two and a half minutes of spaced-out guitar ambience (notes, not drones or noise) before Scheidt introduces the riff and is joined by Reiseberg and Foster to begin the build into the song.

Like much of Atma, “Adrift in the Ocean” is patient, which adds to the argument for its maturity. It’s a full four minutes before it “gets heavy” and another two before the first growl introduces the concept of vocals. If the song were 25 minutes long, that would be one thing, but the halfway point is just passed before Scheidt begins a verse. And if you think that’s a problem, you’re doing it wrong. While YOB has shown on “Prepare the Ground” and “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore” that they can work well within a rigid verse/chorus structure (they’ve done it on prior records too), the closer is purposefully more open. Scheidt nonetheless works in a memorable chorus/repetition of melody well met by his riff, and it’s a genuine surprise when the song hits a wall, the guitars cut out and it’s Reiseberg’s bass setting the bed for the second Kelly guest appearance, which begins with whispers over heavy sub-tribal tom hits from Foster.

YOB triumphs again here, Scheidt’s guitar returning over the rhythm of those hits with a lead worthy of capping Atma and an overwhelming psychedelic vibe that transitions surprisingly smoothly into the final riff of the album – which is all doom, agonizingly slow and utterly gripping. As “Adrift in the Ocean” plays out, cutting to just a fading out guitar, the breathtaking silence that follows is nearly as weighted as the crashes, feedback and hum that preceded, and it’s all the more understandable why the band would choose to finish Atma with it instead of the longer “Upon the Sight of the Other Shore,” which isn’t short on noise, but hardly has such a stately feel. “Adrift in the Ocean” is more of a culmination, and for that it’s placed precisely where it needs to be.

The prospect of a new YOB record in 2011 was reason enough to be excited, but the statement of progress the band makes with Atma is – as a fan – a thrill on another level entirely. The creative evolution of this band is what has always made their albums essential, and Atma is no different – even as they set the parameters of what they want YOB to be, they continue to expand the boundaries for themselves. Six full-lengths in, they inspire no less awe than ever, and one can only stand and pity whoever tries to top them in the rest of this year. Atma is completely and truly necessary, and if you’ve read this far into the review, I owe you at very least the debt of making that as clear as possible.

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