If you spend some time digging through interviews and profiles of YOB, you'll find the consensus on the long-running heavy-as-full-stacks army of Oregon's Mike Scheidt is that his band fits partially into nearly half a dozen interconnected subgenres: psychedelic rock, stoner rock, stoner metal, blues metal, and, most consistently, doom metal. From associated instruments to target demographics, several factors unite those niches, not least of which is the propensity to indulge a sound, solo, or song for minutes on end. As it is with High on Fire, so it is with Hawkwind, and as it is with Earth, so it is with Eyehategod: When a band latches onto something it loves, be prepared to go the distance.
YOB, it seems, is no different: "The Great Cessation", the title track of the trio's previous album, was a colossal 21-minute closer that took its time snaking through several obsessions, from the twinkling introduction and a throbbing mid-tempo midsection to a monolithic coda that felt like a great, malevolent sigh. Similarly, "Adrift in the Ocean" ends the band's latest LP Atma with a magnificent 16-minute rise: Middle Eastern-influenced guitars tessellate over teased cymbals until the full trio of Scheidt, drummer Travis Foster, and bassist Aaron Reiseberg lurches forward, rising and collapsing in thick, deliberate bursts for about eight minutes. Like its predecessor, Atma closes in a glorious burnout, Scheidt's post-rock-sized guitar solo ultimately smearing into a drone over a mangled drum limp.
One of YOB's chief accomplishments here and throughout much of its discography has been its sterling ability to maintain a sense of momentum, whether the track ends after five minutes or pushes into the teens. The shortest of Atma's five tunes, "Upon the Sight of the Other Shore", nears the eight-minute mark thanks to several Geezer Butler-gone-Godflesh verses and a handful of guitar solos. Its sense of constant movement, though, isn't unlike that of the preceding "Before We Dreamed of Two", the album's 16-minute, three-part marathon: In spite of languid riffs and an occasional absence of drums, "Dreamed" never sits anywhere for too long and, more important, never bores.
In several Eastern religions, atma means a more complete aware version of the self. Scheidt uses that word during the refrain (or mantra, maybe?) of "Dreamed", singing "Self reaching outward/ Toward within" at the apogee of the riff’s power. The bulk of Atma seems to be about some human realization that's more meaningful than the mundane, where change and finality and death and loss actually work toward something important. "Burning within from what must be/ The desire of the one to be witnessed," he howls as if caught in mid-strangulation at the end of the title track, a menacing swirl of drums and distortion at his back. You can hear those ideas throughout Atma, a record that never takes the space it's been given for granted. Each passing second feels like a chance for a new thought, a happy diversion. That's not what you expect from the stasis and slow shifts of doom metal or anything with which YOB is generally associated. It's exactly what makes every bit of Atma so very powerful.
If you were a novice forming a metal band in 2011, YOB's psychedelic heaviness might not be a bad place to start. It can, after all, be played at length with a basic riff, a drummer with some stamina and heavy hands, and a bassist that can find the roots of chords. It doesn’t require the speed of black metal, the equipment of drone, or the skill of death and technical metal. You don't even need an especially great singer: Scheidt is more communicative and versatile than dominating. What's more, it's a sound that's proven ripe for crossover into both indie rock and mainstream rock circles during the last decade. So why not? Indeed, there's a glut of bands currently mining post-Sabbath, after-Sleep stoner metal, playing lean, distorted riffs over clattering china. In that crowded lot, YOB should serve as a reminder that, even in more common forms, there are simply those who do it better-- through more experience, better conceits or, as is the case with Atma, a compelling mix of both. Scheidt's guitar tone is unimpeachable here, and he uses it as an unwavering guide for the trio: His riffs control the pushes and the pulls, the rises and the falls, the stops and the starts. And with YOB, a doom-stoner-sludge-psych band with too much thrust to fit into any of those holes for very long, that's the deciding, divining factor.
