It’s been over forty years since Black Sabbath, Pentagram, and their kin founded the Church of Doom, one of metal’s oldest and most enduring houses of blasphemy. These days, metal’s gnarled family tree has blossomed into a dizzying number of subgenres, but almost all of it comes back to doom, regardless of tempo or texture. Doom may center itself around stoned stupor, Satanic camp, and sick riffage, but it also possesses a meditative musical mode buried deep inside it, a glassy-eyed glance into life’s grimmest mysteries.
Earlier this summer, Arkansas's Pallbearer provided a winning example of this approach with their esoteric, genre-ignorant Foundations of Burden, and now the always-crushing YOB have returned with a similarly-striving epic called Clearing the Path to Ascend. With seven excellent albums and over a decade of experience under their belt, the esteemed Oregon outfit have long since established themselves as one of the most progressive acts of their generation. Psychedelic rock, stoner rock, stoner metal, blues metal, ambient: all reside comfortably in YOB’s wheelhouse, coalescing and collapsing on a path that stretches as far as the listener’s imagination. The band's most recent effort, 2011’s Atma, took its inspiration from the Eastern concept of “the higher self”—a theme they fleshed out with droning, circular mantras and monolithic instrumentation. YOB take similarly transcendent strides on Clearing the Path to Ascend, reshaping the traditionally-forlorn moans and groans of doom into an amorphous roar that, however hellish, shimmers with something resembling hope.
As is typical with YOB (and doom in general), enlightenment doesn’t come easy. Clearing the Path to Ascend contains only four tracks, each surpassing the ten-minute mark and the heaviness of a black hole. On opener “In Our Blood", philosopher Alan Watts offers some soothing instructions—“Time to wake up”—before gingerly stepping aside for a rude awakening: Mike Scheidt’s banshee-like wail, accompanied by swooping, sullen guitars. Bassist Aaron Rieseberg and drummer Travis Foster handle the majority of the heavy lifting, but it’s Scheidt’s singing that drives the band’s metamorphic energy. He’s not a singer so much as he’s a shaman, using his diverse range of grotesque death growls and plaintive melodies to toy with the listener’s preconceptions, especially where identity is concerned.
Such is the queasy fun of "In Our Blood", Scheidt's sixteen-minute trip to hell and back. His thin, feeble tenor coasts along smoothly for the first several minutes, but before long, something wicked reaches beyond the void and snatches up the melody, leaving in its place the sound of utter ruin. Scheidt's chameleonic vocals present the band with an ever-replenishing resource from which they derive some of the album's most lasting material: the unfurling, feminine "Unmask the Spectre", which is situated alongside "Marrow", the album's defiant death knell of a closer.
YOB’s latest record stands as one of their densest, so it's good that the band's greatest asset, their impeccable pacing, remains intact. “Unmask the Spectre” plays out as a masterclass in dramatic tension, its punishing core buffered on both sides by moody, barren sludge. At last, Scheidt finally unleashes his thunderous yell, a solo nipping at its heels—and before long, he's whispering again, dragging everything back into the gloaming. The power of darkness depends on contrast, so by spacing out their otherworldly confrontations, the Oregonians ensure that the true path lay ever in sight.
