Yob, Song by Song: Our Raw Heart

Yob: Song by Song is a series of articles that examines each and every Yob song in chronological manner. This one is on Our Raw Heart, the seventh and final track of their eighth album Clearing The Path To Ascend.

So here we are. The end of the line; Our Raw Heart. Picture this: it’s summer. It’s your favourite place to be. You finally knocked out the lumberyard bully. All of your friends are there. You have a cold beverage of your choice* in hand. Yob are on stage and start playing this song. You cry. The end. 

Much like when a space shuttle lands successfully and the NASA control room goes mad, or when (spoiler alert) Warden Norton discovers Andy DuFrasne’s escape tunnel, when the band explodes in at 1.19, it’s a special moment. The double-tracked guitars are shimmery and glassy, but also warm, swimming in delay and chorus FX.

In the piece on opening track Ablaze, I said that the album title, Our Raw Heart, sounds very emo. However, Our Raw Heart – the song – sounds very happy, almost like Torche’s Harmonicraft played at 33 instead of 45 RPM. It is in the same vein as Beauty in Falling Leaves; gentle, melodic, yet always powerful. And despite the heavy repetition, Our Raw Heart has an ascending feeling. The two main chord changes that make up the songs only consist of a couple of chords each, rising through a major progression to a create an ascending feeling. Crescendos are more characteristic of post-rock or metal, so in a sense, this is closer to Isis’ Weight, or a Cult of Luna track, than to War Pigs or Psalm 9. Maybe it’s…hmm…post-doom? The lyrics stop short of reflecting the joyous feel, instead expressing a transcendental, at times, wistful, feel:

Ashes within clay
Shaped upon an earthen wheel
Pour into this vessel
Drained and filled again

On an album of big tracks, I get the impression that the album was named after this song not just because it’s the biggest, but also because it is a summation of what Yob seem to what to say – there is a sense of vulnerability, but also positivity.

Besides being the biggest track of the album, it’s also my favourite. I don’t resent one second of its fourteen-minute running time; the length creates a desert rock/psychedelic vibe, and the music video even has an audio visualiser thing going on. This is one hell of a closer, and in the world that Yob create, it really is my favourite place to be.

*

As stated before, the story of Yob is an ongoing one, so I don’t want to draw a line on anything yet, but I feel that Yob’s music has become informed by the scars they have gathered along the way; line-up challenges, mental health issues, lawsuits, physical health illness. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next.

As also stated, as of writing in February 2022, this is the most recent – and thus last – Yob song. No more songs means no blogposts about songs. As such, this is the last Song By Song blogpost, and this is the closer on this series. I wrote the first blogpost – Universe Throb – in June 2016. I really didn’t think it would take me five years and eight months to write 45 blog pieces, but I like to think I always dug deep into each song and found something worth saying. Think of it a bit like The Return of the King – it’s happy, it’s sad, it goes on for a long time. Thanks for reading. Go listen to Yob.

*A banana daiquiri, please.

Yob Song by Song: Original Face

 

Yob: Song by Song is a series of articles that examines each and every Yob song in chronological manner. This one is on Original Face, the sixth track of their eighth album, Our Raw Heart.

Although it’s not unusual for Yob to play in 6/8 (see The Lie That Is a Sin, Catharsis and All The Children Forgotten), it’s a time signature that metal bands typically tend to drop into,¹ rather than write whole songs in² (as opposed to 4/4, the most common time signature). Original Face stays in 6/8 throughout, and much like how a river can be deceptively fast, it flows along, propelled by some great fills by Travis Foster. This certainly isn’t the plod of your Dad’s doom.

The chord progression is melancholic, rather than super gnarly; the main riff moves from the root to the minor third then to the major second. The last chord is an usual choice – it’s a slightly ‘ambiguous’ mood to end a chord progression on. However you cut it, there is a melodicism to the riff and an anguish to Scheidt’s voice, and the lyrics are, in a general sense, about a narrator fighting through pain in order to find a higher truth – not particularly new material for Yob, but in light of Scheidt nearly dying in a lot of pain, fitting.

What is unusual, however, is the guitar solo! Yob have very few guitar solos, and, fittingly, it’s an unusual solo in itself, alternating every few bars between the traditional approach of a high-pitched melody and the rhythm line.

Next track: Our Raw Heart.

1. Death do this a lot, especially as they got more and more proggy.

2. Agalloch, but also any metal band with any Viking content – Waldruna are a good example.

Yob Song by Song: The Screen

Yob: Song by Song is a series of articles that examines each and every Yob song in chronological manner. This one is on The Screen, the second track of their eighth album, Our Raw Heart.

The Screen, AKA, The Steamroller.

The Screen reminds me of the horror film It Follows. An entity invisible to all but its prey follows that person at a slow, ceaseless shuffle, never hurrying, never slowing down, until it reaches the hunted person and turns them into a human pretzel : (

Likewise, The Screen never speeds up and never slows down, with bone–crushing, human–pretzel forming density. It chugs along with heavy palm muting and bone–dry distortion, with only three riffs to the whole song. It’s cyclical, moving from riff A to riff B to riff A to riff B to riff C back to riff A and onwards, ever onwards. This is a statement of intent – most bands wouldn’t have the audacity to do this for nearly 10 minutes, which is a wise move, because most bands couldn’t make it work for 10 minutes. But Yob can. The very simple drumbeat would have been easy to overplay, but drummer Travis Foster avoids this in favour of a ‘colossus out for a stroll’ beat, and it’s all the closer to being a horror soundtrack for it. Mike Scheidt’s vocals, deep and inhuman, intensify this sense of lurking horror – whereas just one song ago I was pontificating on how expansive Yob sounded, now they’re writing streamrolling riffs and calling a song The Screen.

Next track: In Reverie.

Yob Song by Song: Stay Awake

In episode eight of The Midnight Gospel, the often irresponsible but philosophically–curious protagonist, Clancy, asks a dying character how to handle death. They answer ‘[…] turn toward this thing called death […] and see what it has to teach you’.

I’m not inside Mike Scheidt’s head, but at a punt I’d say Stay Awake, the title of his first and only solo album (and what he has tattooed across his hands) is to be taken in the same sense. It’s a declaration of intent, and for the most part, it achieves this. It consists of one (sometimes two) acoustic guitars, Scheidt singing, and occasional female backing vocals. Although his deference to strumming along in 6/8 is as prevalent here as it is throughout Yob’s oeuvre, Scheidt sings in a different manner, far more high–pitched, which, with the sparsity of the music, marks it as its own beast. The acoustic format fosters a sense of intimacy anyway; it’s getting up close to one person, their guitar and their thoughts. But, in this case, that one man is usually armed with a pointy guitar and amps which could drown out a Harrier Jump Jet. All clean vocals and major keys, the intimacy is also intensified by the lyrical focus;

Burning hearts rise to a new dawn
Nothing is what it appears to be
Love brimming busting at the seam

Stay Awake also exudes stillness, largely due to the heavy repetition; it is nowhere as nearly exploratory as Yob’s offerings, but this feels reflective rather than stuck for ideas. Stay Awake shouldn’t be understood as a continuation of Yob in the sense of ‘doom goes acoustic’, á la The Boss dropping the E Street Band and writing Nebraska. At the most, it is a counterpoint, and there is a a sense that Scheidt did this for himself, rather than to present another side of Yob to the world.

Song By Song: Age Eternal

In chapter nine of Wuthering Heights Heathcliff loses his shit and skips town for three years. Eventually he reappears in God’s Own Country¹ to chew gum and kick ass, without Emily Brontë ever specifying where he went on his gap yahs. This is an important bit of character formation, but nevertheless, I much prefer it in Batman Begins when Bruce Wayne drops off the face of the earth and the film shows him learning martial arts in Bhutan, or in The Two Towers when Gandalf brawled it out with The Human Torch for one hundred and fifty–two rounds, or how The Count of Monte Cristo includes eight years of Edmond Dantès learning card tricks, weightlifting and how to hotwire cars.

Point being, what happened when Yob called it a day in 2006? Did the former members of Yob save Gotham City? Save Middle Earth? Dig their way out of prison islands? Chew gum, kick ass and become the anti–hero of a lengthy Victorian tragedy/romance/gothic novel which students of English Literature shall forever continue to endure? Travis Foster and Isamu Sato may well have done any of these things for all that anyone seems to know about them during this period. On the other hand, in either late 2005 or early 2006, Mike Scheidt formed a generally–forgotten band called Middian with Will Lindsay of Indian and A Storm of Light and Scott Headrick, bassist and drummer respectively.

Going by their own description, Middian were ‘very much in the vein of YOB, but more angry and mid–paced on average, but still with roots in slow doom and the cosmic vibe that was a part of YOB’². As such, before listening to their sole album Age Eternal, I was expecting it to be a mid–paced trudge and and a poor man’s Yob, forgotten because it was forgettable. As it turns out, I am a poor man’s critic, and Age Eternal is actually rather good.

Doom only in part, it has a different feel to any Yob album. It contains the aforementioned aggression, with opening track Dreamless Eyes coming in fast with punk discordance and the vocals entering with a head–splitter of a scream from Scheidt. It is a diverse listen, with a big slow down of pace five minutes in, and throughout the album the riffs move around a lot more than Yob’s typically do. The teak–thick ending of Dreamless Eyes gives way to the echoing, glassy guitar of second track The Blood of Icarus, just before the rest of the band enter with the sort of riff that makes it hard to move from the floor. The eponymous Age Eternal is light and fluttering where The Celebrant is aggressive, and closing track Sink To The Centre spends a while with a guitar tolling like a bell, but none of that merry shit, more like when Ice–T sampled Black Sabbath and rapped about being in the wrong fuckin’ part of town. This track is more Yob–like, slower and weirder to digest than the other tracks, eventually freaking out into a big psychedelic outro.

Scheidt with short hair. Weird.

Repeated and spaced–out listens (referring to the passage of time, rather than mental state) impressed upon me how good this band really was. It is unmistakably Scheidt playing, but Middian were very much their own band. After this one album, Middian would end under unfavourable circumstances. Unfavourable, rather than unfortunate, as they were effectively sued into paralysis by another band going by the name of Midian, based on the other side of the U.S. in Wisconsin, who issued a cease and desist order in October 2007. Only Middian’s (two d’s) side of the story is readily available, but it looks like Midian (one d) weren’t happy with Middian’s (two d’s) attempts to placate them, and the situation escalated into a federal law suit, which ended with Middian (two d’s) not being allowed (two l’s) to sell their album, being dropped from Metal Blade Records, and disbanding in December 2007.

Having done a bit of research, Midian of one d did not make good on all that litigation by giving the world some decent music. However, as Buddha probably once said, the silver lining to this cloud of shite is that the death of Middian would lead to to the second coming of Yob. As Middian wound up, Scheidt was approached by Foster, fresh from saving Gotham City, about playing a Yob reunion gig. Aaron Rieseberg was recruited to bring the four string thunder (presumably Sato was still busy saving Middle Earth). The gig was good. The gig was loud. Tracks were written. An album was planned. Much like Heathcliff, Yob were back to chew gum, kick ass and play doom.

1. Yorkshire, of course.
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070420214903/http://www.middian.org:80/bio.htm/

Yob Song by Song: Grasping Air

Grasping Air makes me think of being a cave with no light. Everything about this song is on edge, pervaded with unspeakable dread. The reverberating guitar intro sets teeth on edge before leading into a deadly, crawling riff. Alongside Travis Foster’s skillful drumming maintaining a sense of momentum even at this consistently slow pace, it is also one of my favourite performances by Scheidt. He has described himself as ‘[…] not the most polished guitar player’¹, but in terms of feel he is one of the best. (His statement should be taken with a pinch of salt anyway). Case in point; listening to this song, I had a smart ass theory about what he was playing, but when it actually came up to picking up a (bass) guitar and playing along, it turned out most of the time he’s just playing one chord, a dirty ol’ A tritone. He plays it in such an expressive way that it creates the aforementioned motion and tension, rather than it turning into Another Stoner Odyssey Based On One Chord.

As for the title. If Grasping Air is the action of someone trying and failing not to fall, an instinctive act produced by terror, it means trying to take hold of something that’s not there. In light of the lyrics, and Yob’s general shtick, I read this title as a metaphor for the misconception of reality. And now you’re probably thinking, does organised religion make an appearance? You betcha. Cue chorus:

Ancient wounds fester and bleed
Empty food from which they feed
Sustain the wealth
Subliminate the self
Create the suffering we need

In particular, this song approaches this subject matter from the angle of the cycle of dependency, the first line being ‘Entwine with despair like a lover’. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description for doom. Is doom metal an organised religion? Either way, we are left in the dark. Dot dot dot.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYuFFhE10TE

Yob Song by Song: The Illusion of Motion

I used to be unhappy. I used to wonder, ‘what does obey the riff really mean?’ Thanks to The Illusion of Motion, know I now. Now I am happy. Now I am doomed.

The Illusion of Motion is slow, often dissonant, unfriendly on the ear as it scrapes along, and confrontational through the extremities that it presents; the average bpm is under a beat per second, the guitars are tuned to Drop A, the chords are slurred, and it seems to slow down as it rumbles on. Individually these characteristics can be found in many Yob songs, but here they have all been combined, and at 26 minutes and ten seconds, this melding has taken placed within Yob’s longest song.

Whilst wondering why this album was named after this particular song, I found myself thinking that maybe, at over 20 minutes long, this song is an illusion of motion in its form. There are a couple of problems with this idea. Firstly, I doubt this would have been Yob’s thought process – it seems a bit self–defeating. Secondly, this form and this repetition become part of this song’s strength; as is the case with nearly all Yob songs, it feels as though these lengths are not played for their own sake, but because these lengths are needed for Scheidt, Sato and Foster to play all that needs to be played, and for Scheidt, the main song writer, to channel all that he needs to say. Infinite Jest is over 1100 pages long (shut up, it’s great) because that’s how long David Foster Wallace thought it needed to be to tell the story that it does. Thirdly, and more explicitly, this title refers to, you guessed it, organised religion, though through a decidedly more philosophical angle this time round;

Try to climb the human walls
Tear them down and see what remains
Emptied of the embattled false
Will to resist disappears
Emptied of half truths taught from birth
With the dawn of emptiness

The lyrics confront the idea of getting what we want but not being happy; that’s why it’s called The Illusion of Motion. This brings its confrontational properties back to the fore; at 19.40 (yes, that’s minutes and seconds, not the year) a sudden burst of speed drags the track into a whirling, feedback–heavy skronk–out.

As an album, The Illusion of Motion is the first album where Yob began to write big, sad songs, and is more expansive than previous album Catharsis, which remains relatively straightforward within the oeuvre of Yob, and a sign of the slightly less doom–orientated and more particular approach of Yob’s next album, The Unreal Never Lived.

I used to be unhappy. I used to wonder, ‘what does obey the riff really mean?’ Thanks to The Illusion of Motion, and its big, sad songs, know I now. Now I am happy. Now I am doomed.

 

Yob Song by Song: Doom #2

As the title suggests, Doom #2 is much less expansive than most of Yob’s other numbers. Standing at six minutes long, it is their second shortest song and comprised of only two main riffs, neither of which are particularly refined. The intro riff could be a weighed–down Black Flag track until the drums kick in with cymbal–heavy fills and Scheidt starts roaring.

 

Going by the title, I’d guess that this was an early song that Yob didn’t feel would fit onto whichever of their earlier albums, or even their 2000 self–titled demo. At another guess, it could just as equally be a number Yob wrote off the cuff. Besides being their second shortest song ever (the average track length on this album is nearly 13 and a half minutes), this is also one of Yob’s most nakedly aggressive, and at 168bmp one of their fastest. Even when it thins out for an interlude there’s menace lurking under that wah, and lyrically Scheidt et al carry the flame from Exorcism of The Host by still sounding particularly pissed about organised religion;

Inside the anger grows
From words made up of dust
The false leaped from the breath of centuries
Tearing our lives apart

I wasn’t a particularly big fan of this track at first. For a band that can be as good as they can be, I thought that this was quite a generic harsh stoner number, ultimately disposable, lacking memorable riffs and a captivating structure. However, with time I have come to consider it to be quite distinctive; maybe it’s the way it sits between a 13 minute song and a 26 minute song, or, in a discography of a band known for their depth and philosophical concerns, its rough edges and punk energy.

Yob Song by Song: Exorcism of the Host

…Yob disagree, Mr Angel.

As in preceding track Ball of Molten Lead, Exorcism of the Host begins with a tolling bell. Somebody says something through backmasking. Scheidt roars. Drums crash. Guitars hammer in with a weird, harsh, descending riff full of chromatics. This is funeral doom (for those not in the know: think of a dirge) and the most mournful track Yob had penned to this date. The momentum of prior track, Ball of Molten Lead, is misleading – it really doesn’t carry through, although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although there is some pace in the ‘verses’ and ‘choruses’, including a great, clean, solemn guitar solo at 8.30, Exorcism of The Host still averages a bpm of 44 and is heavily repetitive, leading to two thoughts:

1) The exorcism in question is an auditory one, created through the repetition of the aforementioned hammering riff for seven and a half minutes, until heaving into a riff of concrete after nine minutes and finishing on a scream best described as ‘painful’. This matches the lyrics, which invert the usual concept of exorcism by placing organised religion as the evil that needs to be cast out and away from humanity:

Oil and water
Fuel for the slaughter
Breeds remorse and breeds regret
The false prophets scream their disease

2) What separates this – and there certainly is something that does – from more average funeral doom bands, who also rely on extensive repetition? More specifically, what if these bands were made to go acoustic, as a kind of litmus test? This is a bit of an unfair question, as being amplified is clearly part of most doom bands’ sound, but bear with this idea; would their riffs and song writing still function without spiralling feedback, decibels and distortion? Going out on a limb, I’d say that for Yob the answer is yes, and that certainly wouldn’t be the answer for a couple of big bands I can think of. Despite the heft of this track, maybe this is because Yob don’t sound like a doom band whose only direct influences are other doom bands.

Yob Song by Song: Ball of Molten Lead

Doom has many tricks up its sleeve, some clever, some not so clever (‘Hey, play riff A for 10 minutes, then riff B for 20 minutes, then I guess we’ll just jam it out from there’) (which, it should be said, does work sometimes) (Bong, I’m looking at you), but there aren’t many tricks that top that simple, atavistic sound with which metal was announced to the world: a tolling bell.

Comparing Black Sabbath’s titular song to the opening track of The Illusion of Motion, Ball of Molten Lead, the contrast between the two is more immediately obvious. In Black Sabbath the influence of the blues is more readily apparent, Ozzy sings, Iommi and Butler didn’t detune as far as Scheidt, it isn’t informed by three decades of metal – you can hear how much drummer Bill Ward was influenced by big band jazz – and the structure is a simpler and more compact AB pattern. Ball of Molten Lead is very much informed by doom, there’s a lotta slack in those strings (read: is detuned by seven notes), Scheidt roars, and the structure involves quite a more few letters of the alphabet. With a couple of listens, however, a subtler similarity arises; both Black Sabbath and Ball of Molten Lead tell horror stories, which in their form, are particular to the genre of doom. To generalise, where death metal and grindcore tend to be gratuitous with gore or suffering, as is thrash when it’s not talking about partying and nukes, and black metal is railing against Judeo–Christian ideology over there in the corner (sludge passed out in the bath tub a while ago), doom works more along the lines of you’ve got an unpleasant death coming up real soon, but we’re not going to give you the details, so you’re just gonna have to find those out for yourself. Hang tight while we soundtrack these closing moments of your life.

It’s straightforward enough to hear Black Sabbath and know that, after the intro of rain and a tolling bell and that tritone, an unreckonable and sinister figure designates the narrator ‘the chosen one’. As mentioned, at first Ball of Molten Lead compares as more sophisticated, but set up by the wailing wind and the tolling bell, when the rolling riff of the reverberating guitar and marching snare of Ball of Molten Lead enters there’s a comparable sense of the eleventh hour being at hand. To my ears/overactive imagination, it conjures a scene of surrounding and endless waves, being pushed along with their crashes and all alone. The opening lyrics are ‘Death on the horizon’, and the lead guitar line that enters at 5.20 reminds me of maybe that most canonical metal song about dying, For Whom The Bell Tolls. There is a new harshness to the vocals, Scheidt utilising screaming alongside his roar for the first time, exacerbated by the low EQ cut. As it mutates into what becomes the verse riff, it becomes more dissonant, with three harsh descending chords at the end of every four bars. The lyrics, told from the perspective of a dying person, deliberately jar just before the song ends; from first to last verse (let’s call it them ‘verses’ for the sake of argument) they describe moving from

The soul is unprepared
Fear runs deep
Always agonizing
On what can’t be known

to

Void the gaze without the eyes
Shedding tears but no one cries
Inhale the space of the vessel
Bid the host a last goodbye

But before we all get to join hands, hum Kumbaya and float off to the great gig in the sky, they close on

I try but I can’t dislodge this
Ball of doubt.

When it comes to dying, doubt has a powerful hold; what really happens after death? The truth is that no one knows – and that’s as heavy, unsolvable and universal is it gets.