Yob – The Unreal Never Lived (Metalblade)
4 songs, 51 minutes of doom metal. Songs are patient, change a lot, vocals have effects on them and all things are heavy and umm, spiritual? But this is not brutal/pained doom metal, this is often very melodic and even catchy like High on Fire or Pelican. This is the 3rd release from Eugene, OR trio and has a lot in common with their last album.
**1. Starts with what sounds like an explosion and then a good minute of near silence. Guitar shows up strumming a clean strum and then you are pummeled with heavy riffs. There is something about the way he plays guitar that reminds me of High on Fire. The track goes through a number of changes including a psychedelic noisy section, a stop/start section, and others but always returns to the somewhat relentless guitar strum.
**2. Clean guitar and bass only at the beginning. Then a slow heavy doom sound. Vocals are more spoken than sung and the track doesn’t really speed up. There is a trippy guitar solo during a psychedelic the last part of the track. This is doom.
3. Even slower than the last track. Fuzzier, more distorted and heavier guitar. Vocals do a lot of different things on this track. Screams, clean spoken, effected, and a few other sounds.
**4. I’ve always like his use of flange on his guitar which he uses for the guitar intro to this 21 minute track. This track has a bit more of a prog rock flavor and I even hear Rush in there. As you can imagine by the length of this track it goes through lots of changes and dare I say is epic. The flanged guitar, into a big slow and heavy chugging sound, which, after 15 minute changes into triplet (?) heaven of quick guitar while the rest of the band stays slow. The last third of the track reminds me of early Isis.
Wow! -mph