YOB
Catharsis

It's like a migraine.

It emerges from silence, like something coming from afar that slowly, inexorably, becomes more intense, more present, more heavy.

It's acid doom in its most desperate form: distorted guitars in apparent hypnotic stasis, cynical in their exasperating indolence, monumental in their heaviness, exploding in slow motion, as if time, chilled by cosmic cold, flowed more slowly. It's a dark, pitch-black psychedelia that doesn't want to make you travel, lighten your senses, and take you to a more beautiful and colorful place, but rather keeps your head pressed against a wall, pressing hard, harder, making you hold your breath until your lungs dissolve like snails in salt.

They are whispers that become screams, it's a voice that greets you treacherously and rancorously like the cry of a caged animal biting its tongue to hold back anger: it hides somewhere out there, in the interplanetary blackness, swinging on hypnotic vocal lines similar to sick lullabies. Until suddenly, when you least expect it, it jumps out of its den, widens its jaws and swallows you with the roar of a deep growl, almost like a distorted, violent retch.

Released in 2003, just a year after the excellent debut "Elaboration Of Carbon," "Catharsis" probably remains the pinnacle of the production of the Portland trio, led by Mike Scheidt (guitar and voice), in this album joined by big Jap Isamu Sato (bass) and big hippie Gabe Morely (drums).

Three songs for over fifty minutes of cosmic and threatening music, the soundtrack of a Lovecraftian nightmare, the apocalyptic visions of a sick mind. Music built on arpeggios as languid and minimal as they are sinister, hostile, on a few chords distorted by wah-wah, repeated to exhaustion, a few notes that seem to extinguish by natural death until they merge with the silence, then unexpectedly explode in sudden, rabid distortions (the initial "Aeons" - 18:10 and the closing title track - 23:39). The only concession to groove, the central "Ether" (7:16): the beating heart of the creeping chaos evoked by the trio, whirling and gigantic frenzied hippie-stoner up-tempo for headbanging, made of adrenaline and nasal, raucous screams of a kind of chimera, between Ozzy, Plant, and Mustaine, trapped in an astronaut suit.

Sick music, capable of evoking interdimensional oblivions, space odysseys, anxiety states that seem never-ending. Painful, aching music that buries itself in your temples like a crown of thorns and electric cables. Like a migraine.

"Apocalypse Never Felt So Good"