YOB
Clearing The Path to Ascend

THE REVIEW

In a time when bread costs more than whores (and indeed there are more and more whores because, in the end, they too have to buy bread), what do you do? You take two days off for a wedding, laugh it off, and then, exhausted by "You should have turned there," "Look, it was over there," "I told you... we've already passed here," you let yourself be won over by the delight that the Watermelon Pear Festival of Montecoronaro can offer on a chilly late summer night. On stage, the Liscioperanti. In my mind, "The Mental Tyrant." All around, the Apennines and "the immense beauty that purified reality."

[crossfade on a random ass from a random channel of Italian prime-time TV]

It was 2003 (or maybe it was 2004? I don't know... after all, for some obscure astral conception, since I've been listening to bad music, I tend to forget things) and every afternoon I stayed at school because for people like me there were art courses, which translated to smoking pot in the gymyard with the most unfortunate and marginalized people you could find around. The Sleep threw a party to transform half into Om's contemplation and half into the spice of High on Fire; the Electric Wizard also threw a party, to transform half into crappy Electric Wizard (though I've been told that the latest is good...) and the other half into Ramesses, which, by the way, is a ragged and rancid group that I won't even begin to describe or you'd get lost. Anyway... in the general wasteland, the fastest to fill the gap and carry on the legacy of that magical duo, at the time synonymous with heavy and acidic Stoner/Doom (stuff emerging from labels like Earache and Rise Above, read Lee Dorrian, who if we were waiting for someone else, metalheads would now be jacking off over Japanese teen groups with improbable names like Babymetal) were YOB who released in rapid succession "Catharsis," "The Illusion of Motion," and "The Unreal Never Lived," a triplet that, in the judgment of the writer and anyone with functional ears not afflicted by incurable musical dementia, sealed their fate: the scepter left vacant by the two aforementioned sacred monsters was seized by them, along with a devilish load of more or less psychotropic drugs.

But just at the peak... Poof! Gone! Without warning and without even passing go. Like an ordinary Enrico Letta. And the feeling left inside me was that of a distracted and bastard tug on the filter that you yourself had made by sacrificing the cardboard attendance sheet from your soccer matches, when you only needed one more turn to play for free the following Monday. Disheartenment. From the ashes, deus ex machina Scheidt gave birth to Middian, who, with just one insignificant album, had to eclipse due to legal issues with another band over the use of the moniker (how could they let it slip indeed...) and so... voilà! YOB reappears, this time under Profound Lore.

So, when in 2009 they came out with "The Great Cessation," a kind of vigor resurfaced in me toward that collective consciousness with greasy long hair and sleeveless denim that desired uglification in the literal sense or things like buzzing the wrong apartment and finding yourself in front of a congregation of demons cooking methamphetamine inside human heads. I remember reading, at the time, a concoction of reviews that reeked of week-old cheese and statements like "Hey you who listen to heavy stuff, YOB are the coolest because they are the heaviest band on earth, I swear!" Now I think they write epistles about the American folk revival directly from Cappadocia.
With the release of "Atma," I was convinced that interest in something new from them had definitively dwindled. Not because the album didn't have cool ideas but... I don't know... it was there quietly, never demanding a listen, and every time I gave it another chance, it hit me right on the groin just like those "69 - de puta madre" shirts that were so fashionable among youngsters back then.
And yet now... maybe it's because of this cultural revolution vibe floating around us, maybe it's because of the severance taxed at 50% that I'll be able to collect in a few months, or maybe it's because I still haven't figured out what the hell Pinterest is for, now I feel the need again for something moldy but comforting. I feel the need again for a shot of VoV to sip while staring at the fireplace fire. At least before I completely lose my mind and go vote for the Monarchist Alliance.
"Clearing the Path to Ascend" is sheer grandeur. It vibrates and burns. You observe it, and it snickers back at you: "Do you see that every once in a while some nice shit floats up from the slime pond of today's and yesterday's music, you Idiot!" "In Our Blood" starts, and after just 3 minutes you're already wet. A handful of overpowering riffs over 120 dB are enough for you to understand that the new Slipknot album you downloaded out of curiosity the night before is nothing more than the soundtrack of Carosello performed by the Antoniano di Bologna choir. "CtPtA" grows in your hands, sneaks in, dominates but at the right moment explodes, as it should be, as it's meant to. It often opens up, revealing its own obsession. Blurred flashes. Perhaps a hope. Neurosis peek out like cockroaches from the overflow hole in at least twenty passages (having recorded for Neurot can't just be a coincidence), and then there's that "Marrow," placed at the end, with its lush folk and post-rock veins, its almost country longing, the melancholy that reigns supreme, the tear ready to fall and you finding yourself with your mother-in-law's tongue in your mouth who was just bringing fresh basil for pesto. A track so emotionally exhausting that, although it cannot really be considered a lady-killer song, some dicks on the table, in my opinion, it will bring home big time.Maybe from someone with a sleeveless denim known at the Watermelon Pear Festival of Montecoronaro.