Adrift in the Ocean
Yob's Meditations on the End
On my right forearm I have a tattoo that is technically backwards. So described because it is text that is legible facing me--I guess the correct direction being legible instead to an onlooker. The tattoo reads Prepare the Ground. Only one person has guessed correctly that it refers to an attempt to make the bed in which you want to lie for eternity. It's also a song by the band Yob.
The first song I heard from Yob was "Adrift in the Ocean," probably sometime around 2014-2015. "Adrift" and "Prepare the Ground" are both off of Yob's 2011 album Atma. It was a Spotify Discover Weekly recommendation, and it caught me by surprise. The song begins with a plucked electric guitar saturated with big reverb and delay colors. Maybe it's the title, but the song intro projects a sensation of being in some small vessel bobbing up and down in the sea without any sense of direction. If there is a fixed point of the song, a central character in this position, then as the intro progresses, the character is slowly consumed by accumulating drums, thudding bass, and a chiming guitar that eventually churns the throbbing sea into a maelstrom, the character ultimately cast away by the gale of Mike Scheidt's opening roar.
Yob is a very emotional band for me to listen to. It's a little strange to think of a doom metal band being emotional, especially for people who are averse to that kind of music in the first place. It's loud. Heavy. Sometimes unintelligible. But sometimes it is an unmatched and holistic catharsis.
I was adjacent to a negative experience in 2017 that involved grief for many people including myself. I was driving early in the morning a few days after the event, listening to "Marrow" off of Yob's album Clearing the Path to Ascend. Listening to the song was the first time I was able to be openly emotional. Which is itself strange because Yob, and doom as a genre in general, seem to meditate on death in their music, or at least the preparation for and acknowledgement of it as a certainty. But in that moment I experienced a kind of stable positivity that isn't a common feeling.
Positivity in lyrics that meditate on death?
Come bear to witness
Belief shaken to the core
Upon the sight of the other shore
Those from "Upon the Sight of the Other Shore" from Atma
Wretched fools suffer fate
In worlds that they made
Sand slipping through fingers
Wisdom in decay
Those from "Burning the Altar" from The Great Cessation
Endless worlds in endless mind
Caught in dreams of our own design
Dressed and groomed tradition dead
All around you the infinite
Seeing
Beauty in falling leaves
Those from "Beauty in Falling Leaves" from Our Raw Heart
Yob brings the fact of a finite life to the center of their music, but not in a way that is morose, but rather joyful.
To me, Yob's music is a partner. If I'm the character on the boat in "Adrift in the Ocean" then the swelling music is not consuming me, but welcoming and cradling me. This may not be so for everyone that listens to Yob. It is aurally burdensome. But it is comfort to know that there is music that understands and articulates the preparation for our terminal life.
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
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