Anti-gravity capsules are for losers. Place me in an immersion tank and surround my ass with some doom metal. Who wants to float in simulated space conditions when they can choose to hide from the sun and get suffocated by their own sense of abandonment?
YOB aren't an escape. They're metaphysical doom. Sure, you should be scared of evil. It can tailor-make your destruction in a heartbeat. But struggling with your faith, mind, and reason for being placed on this Earth are slower and much more frightening. Which isn't to say they're waiting around for your muscles to atrophy between snare hits (Khanate) or the bass drone to give your bowels a break (Boris). You could do the reference game with them all day, name checking Sleep, Burning Witch, Neurosis, and High on Fire-- even Electric Wizard, Ufomammut, Isis, Melvins, and Black Sabbath wouldn't be out of line. But YOB's The Unreal Never Lived-- four songs-in-50 minutes-- still stands out on its own as epic downtrodden metal with what sounds like seasoned potsmokers throwing in their High Times for some new age religious tracts.
Four songs of peristaltic chug would be nothing without at least a few vocals. Vocalist Mike Scheidt has the diversity to growl, bellow, whisper, yell, and hit some high notes like few other metal singers. Be warned, the high notes can get a little nutless in the Dio or Geddy Lee vain, but they probably only last for around a combined 30 seconds. And that's the only goofy thing about YOB...Oh wait, I just read the lyrics. "Quantum Mystic" with its "His message to this world still resounds for all time/ The Unreal Never Lived and the real does not ever die beyond all birth and death/ The real is timeless/ Open the shutter of the mind and it will be flooded with light" is probably about the Indian Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj who answered most of the questions of life with vague "I am" answers. "Kosmos" even tells me, "Peace lives in the space where no one is there." But remember my teachings, my music reviewing students, "Metal is what it is, when it is what it always was."
Even with some goofy lyrics, YOB sound like doom, the kind that has you up at night wondering why we even bother holding jobs when we barely get paid enough to pay for our housing and vehicles or why we bother befriending people if they are just gonna turn on us. And those methodical bastards in YOB probably enjoy causing that pain.
