Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Clearing the Path to Transcend



I am not going to lie.  I am not qualified to write about music.  I haven't spent decades poring through obscure vinyls in dark record stores building a vast expanse of musical knowledge.  I don't have any connections with any big bands; no hookups for pre-release material.  No one in the music business cares who I am.  

The reality is, I have only been this involved in the music scene since late 2012.  While I have always loved music, it took nearly 35 years to figure out how to take part, and that took a major life change to precipitate the change.  One core tenet of that change, documented elsewhere in this blog, was that I needed to make a deep personal involvement into the musical community a central focus in my life.  I wasn't entirely sure how; I'd always loved heavy music but I seemed to be an island in my passion.  I didn't really know anybody that liked music like I did; I always liked the slower, thicker, experimental tracks from more popular artists.  In a way you could say I always loved doom metal but just didn't know what doom metal was yet.  There were songs like Soundgarden's 4th of July, Smashing Pumpkins' Silverfuck, or Tool's Third Eye that made me wish that bands did that kind of music full time, instead of resigning these epic tracks to deep cuts hidden in the ends of albums.  

It wasn't until earlier in 2012 that I was starting to find out that there were, in fact, bands devoted to this cause.  The first example I stumbled upon was on YouTube, a chance find of the video for 35007's Tsunami, followed shortly by Sea of Tranquility. While not necessarily heavy, this opened me to a world of music not limited to the radio friendliness of 5 minute songs, verse-chorus-verse arrangements, and wide distribution.  It was a matter of a couple weeks before I was addicted to the /r/stonerrock and /r/doommetal subreddits and devouring everything that showed up there.   Heavy, dynamic, expansive music.  I was home.  

The next step was to find doom metal shows in Boise...not an easy task it turns out. There was a local band, Wolvserpent, that played sparingly, but other than that, the only mention of doom metal in this region was of a band called Yob....that had just played a show that I had already missed.  Finding actual information about the band was kind of difficult to do, so I went right to the source and checked out Atma, which they were currently out supporting.  Listening to Atma for the first time, and more importantly, listening to The Mental Tyrant from The Unreal Never Lived, was a strange experience because, not only was it new, it was familiar in the sense that I had been looking for this style of music my entire life.  It wasn't only epic and expansive, it was expressive and deeply emotional.  It was the 15 year old me listening to Siamese Dream for the first time again.  Much like the events going on in my non-musical life, it was a wiping away of decades of rusted assumptions and learning to be a child again, to start over, learn to feel, and fall in love for the first time all over again.  It was foreign and comfortable all at the same time. 

Soon after, it was announced that Yob would be making another stop in my town, in the fall of 2012.  The show was at the Shredder, with Uzala and Norska scheduled to open.  What The Mental Tyrant did for breaking me into real doom metal fandom, Uzala did for breaking me into the local music community.  A local band, specializing in an occult-laced doom sound, they not only showed me that this little town actually makes great music, but how nice people can be.  It's easy to expect an air of elitism, especially among musicians, but instead what I discovered was a welcoming community full of incredibly friendly people.  Even though Yob rolled in extremely late, so late that Norska was taken off the bill and Yob had to use Uzala's gear, the show was a skull shattering masterpiece that lasted well into the wee hours of the morning, followed by a communal gathering of friends celebrating heavy music together.  For a show that could have been considered a disaster, there was not a sad face anywhere; only happiness as Mike and Chad rattled off band names I had never heard of, and while Aaron rummaged in the back of the van to get me a t-shirt and a signed poster. 

This show, on Sept 7, 2012, was the seminal moment where I became a member of the local music community.  This is home.  This is where I needed to be.  It's now been two years since that time, and I have been busy.  I joined a band and watched it disintegrate.  I've been to dozens of shows, and traveled to see more.  I started my concert photography.  I have met countless kind and awesome people and connected with strangers I knew I'd never see again.  So here we are, two years later, and finally, Yob has finally released another album; Clearing the Path to Ascend. Given the role Yob has had in the musical portion of my personal growth, it's not surprising how much anticipation I have to actually participate in the communal excitement of a new album release for the first time.  That being said, my expectations are pretty high, yet at the same time, barring a Billy Corgan-esque sound reinvention, the expectations should be fairly easily met given their history of consistency.  

That being said, Clearing the Path to Ascend is exactly as expected but not without its surprises.  While many Yob albums have 3-5 shorter songs followed by a long epic masterpiece, CtPtA has 4 epic tracks, all of which extend past ten minutes in length. In a sense, this album is a refinement of everything that makes Yob great.  Unlike many other doom acts that hammer the same stylistic theme for eternity, CtPtA is consistently shifting feel.  This is partially because each song tackles a fairly different sound, but also because the songs themselves also move greatly from one space to another.  Unmasking The Spectre is probably the most familiar sounding song on the record, and the one that my now nostalgic brain has tagged as my favorite track, however the track that seems to be getting the most attention is Marrow.  Marrow is the final and most adventurous song on the album, and Mike's time working on acoustic material definitely shines through on the vocal approach to the song. 



After several listens, the question that lies heavily on my mind is, "Why did this not have as much impact on me as Unreal Never Lived?" And the answer, I feel, is one missed all too often by music reviewers; that music is as much about the listener as it is about the artist.  Music is often an emotional bookmark in time; a crossroads where a soul is receptive and vulnerable and a piece of music happens to strike right into that vulnerability.  It's a lock and key, and the magic happens when one perfectly fits the other.  It just so happens that in 2012, I was emotionally vulnerable to what The Mental Tyrant was wielding, and while I love CtPtA, it's just not quite the same as falling in love for the first time again. 

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