Friday Full-Length: YOB, Catharsis
Posted in Bootleg Theater on July 22nd, 2022 by JJ KoczanOne assumes that next year, YOB‘s Catharsis will see a duly deluxe reissue for its 20th anniversary, just as the band’s 2011 outing, Atma (review here), was recently re-pressed to mark 10 years, and Catharsis itself saw reissue for its own first decade in 2013 through Profound Lore and Relapse Records (that is the version above). Seems only the Metal Blade albums — 2004’s The Illusion of Motion (discussed here) and 2005’s The Unreal Never Lived (discussed here) — sit untouched. But every 10 years is fair. If it was every five, I doubt I’d complain. If there was a way to just ultimate-forever-preorder and receive a new edition of every record every time one happened, into perpetuity, you would only be able to call it an investment. A debt paid in installments.
This album changed my life. I mean that. I happened into YOB, like so much else at the time, through StonerRock.com’s All That is Heavy store — both of those things are still missed; call me sentimental — and bought the Abstract Sounds jewel case CD as a new release. It reshaped what I understood the word ‘heavy’ could mean. I’d never heard something that managed to be riff-based, psychedelic, metal, doom, beautiful, crushing and fun all at once, and aside from the novelty of the track lengths — three songs on Catharsis: “Aeons” (18:10), “Ether” (7:16) and “Catharsis” (23:39) — I’d never heard a clean/harsh vocal shift like that from Mike Scheidt in my life, despite the turn of the century’s rampant scream-verse-sing-chorus metalcore ethic.
That eerie, effects-soaked voice, complemented by brutal growls or shouts, whispers as in “Aeons” or pure gutturalism near the end of the title-track — helped expand my definition of genre and form. I’d heard long songs, I’d heard weird songs, but YOB took the tenets of sludge via Neurosis and the stoner metal of Sleep, the it’s-doom-at-any-speed attitude of Cathedral and from all of this and more harnessed once-in-a-generation individualism. I didn’t quite understand it, and I’m still not sure I do, to be honest, but I loved that about it. It seemed like no matter how deep you listened, there was always something new. That funky break in “Aeon!” They’re taking it for a walk! 19 years after the fact, I still feel there’s more to find.
I’ve never written about Catharsis like this before in no small part because I feel so strongly about it. I find I’m nervous doing so now, like all the words want to come out of my brain at the same time and none can squeeze through. Whether it’s the lumbering spaciousness of “Aeons,” or the daring of both speed and a hook in “Ether” — there’s more Matt Pike in that riff than I ever realized; even now I hear something I hadn’t heard before — and the outright emotive expanse of “Catharsis” and the way it throws itself open for its chorus, “The tyranny built upon our philosophies/Not for me in solitude again,” the way those lines aren’t about defiance or a middle finger, not even angry, just knowing of place and self, Catharsis speaks to a timeless sense of not belonging, of seeing differently, while creating reaches in which to dwell.
For the trio then comprised of Scheidt, bassist Isamu Sato and drummer Travis Foster — Aaron Rieseberg (Norska, Simple Forms) took over bass when the band came back from a four-year hiatus with 2009’s 
blistering The Great Cessation (review here; discussed here) — it was formative, part of an ongoing realization of sound that is inarguably still happening in Scheidt‘s songwriting as of the band’s most recent album, 2018’s Our Raw Heart (review here). But the manner in which soul is manifested on Catharsis was legitimately new for heavy-anything at the time, and it turned the weight of the tracks themselves into a ceremony suited to the lyrical searching, that outsider perspective looking in with a kind of resigned disappointment and understanding that something else is needed. This point of view, honest, personal, continues to inform YOB‘s work, and while the band’s prior 2002 debut, Elaborations of Carbon, had spent plenty of time in the cosmos, Catharsis internalized that journey in a manner no one else has since, though plenty have tried.
And “Catharsis” itself would set forth a pattern of ‘the YOB epic’ that spans across their catalog. The Illusion of Motion had its closing title-track, The Unreal Never Lived had “The Mental Tyrant,” The Great Cessation had its closing title-track, Atma disrupted the pattern by making “Adrift in the Ocean” the finale but not the longest song but still followed the quiet-guitar-intro-then-all-hell-breaks-loose modus, while 2014’s Clearing the Path to Ascend (review here) offered the once-in-a-lifetime “Marrow”(discussed here), and Our Raw Heart dared to disrupt, putting “Beauty in Falling Leaves” as fifth of seven cuts. “Catharsis” was the predecessor to them all with its meandering but ever-purposeful procession, its undeniably metal culmination, its drone, thrash ‘n’ bash harvesting of the titular ideal and culmination that seems to find even another level of blast and spiritual release, ending almost while still in progress as if to remind us as listeners that our lives and our worlds will inevitably do the same.
YOB went on after this album to produce some of their generation’s most crucial heavy music, transcending even the cosmic doom that Catharsis helped define, delivering iconic performances in studio and on stage ever driven by passion and correspondingly influential and incomparable. It was by no means the start of the band, preceded by their demo (discussed here) in 2000 and the aforementioned Elaborations of Carbon, but I count Catharsis as the beginning of that process, the Eugene, Oregon, three-piece having discovered their sound and purpose to a degree such that the pursuit and growth across the nearly two decades since has had these three songs at its foundation.
A popular answer to the Obelisk Questionnaire question, “What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?,” is that all life experience is valuable because it has led that individual to become the person they are. Not judging anyone else’s self-assessments — including Scheidt‘s nine years ago — but I don’t agree. I’ve seen and experienced things in my life that I feel like I’d be better off without, whatever ‘character-building’ I might’ve missed out on as a result. When “Catharsis” hits that change as it enters its last seven minutes, though, I’m a believer. I’m ready to accept everything; the good, the bad, the up, the so, so many downs. All of it. To hear that progression, the turns and the push and riff that has just an edge of light coming through all the barrage, feels like a true exhale, low and deep from the center of one’s being. It’s all worth it, if only for a while.
I love this album like family.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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So why now, if I’ve never been able to write about it before? Fair enough.
I was loafing on the couch the other day, broiling in climate change comeuppance, and I suddenly had to ask myself the question of whether these might be the best days of my life.
I am reasonably healthy, physically, at 40 years old, and nowhere near my lowest of lows mentally. I don’t work outside of taking care of my son and doing this, plus odds and ends in other freelance writing/editing. I write for Creem, which feels weird to say. I’m on Gimme Radio — today, 5PM Eastern (playlist here). I finally went to Freak Valley Festival. People say nice things about me on the internet sometimes. My wife still speaks to me. Every now and then we get to make out, which is always nice. My family is close by. My mother is alive. My father is not. My wife’s mother is alive. Her father is not. My wife’s grandmother is alive. My sister and her husband and their two sons, my wife’s sister and her daughter and son are all around, healthy, well, challenging in their tween/teenagerdom, but vibrant people who make any day better and give hope for the future. My own son is four and a half years old and I don’t think we’ve ever spent more time together.
His getting kicked out of camp as part of the all-plans-blown-to-smithereens Summer of Pivot ’22 has resulted in my running point parenting — with about two hours’ break when the don’t-call-her-a-babysitter-she’s-just-his-friend-who-shows-up-to-play-and-gets-paid-for-it comes, that I almost invariably spend writing — more than I ever have. In the last two weeks, he’s gone from swearing he’ll never take off his diapers to playing ‘the cereal game’ aiming his pee in the potty, and he’ll now use a toilet in places that aren’t his house — yesterday at his speech therapist’s and Bed Bath and Beyond, today doing what we call a ‘bush wee’ (that’s what they call it on Bluey) at the nearby park — and he’s amazing and infuriating and just everything all at the same time. He is such, such an asshole, completely overwhelming and hits harder than the riff to Neurosis’ “The Doorway,” but I can’t get away from loving him.
We have this house, in this neighborhood. I eat Jarlsberg cheese like every day. After the kid goes to bed, I can sit on the couch in my garage like a teenager, light up a joint that I bought at the smoke shop right next to the pizza place — pure Jersey — and marvel at the fact that even my next door neighbor who’s a cop can’t do shit about it. That novelty may never go away.
Inside, the air conditioning works. The ice maker works. The shower works. The kitchen isn’t done, but it works too. The coffee pot works, and the Nespresso. I have shit days, often — having one today, in fact — but when was that not the case, and as time goes on into the imperfect stretch of memory, I look back on life events and mundane afternoons of years gone and remember them at least as much positive as negative, times worth being in. I wonder what I’ll say about now if I’m fortunate enough to live another two or three decades, which right now there’s no reason to think I won’t. The world is going to hell. My country is falling apart. Sometimes I need a xanax just to get me over until bedtime. But I’m okay right now, today. When I stand back and look at it, I’m okay. Doesn’t that count too?
I hope that, if these are the best days of my life, if this is the pinnacle, that when I remember them, I remember as well that I tried my best to appreciate them at the time. And that sometimes I even managed to do so.
It was in that spirit that I decided Catharsis was the record to close out this week.
Thank you for reading. Great and safe weekend. Drink water. It’s hot out there.
FRM.
