YOB

Elaborations of Carbon (12th)
by Craig Regala

Please! Six mighty songs of beautiful doom-laden sound, full and expansive. Inverted, hanging riffs, Melvinoid spacey trudging, Tab-esque* motion, and a deep well of compositional creativity keep this moving along. So don’t be put off by the length of the songs; good music, like good sex, is capable of suspending linear time: You enter into the experience and go from there. There are other bands that touch on this feeling: Sleep, Sons of Otis, and Electric Wizard are but three.

The flow of Elaborations… keeps it moving and well, friendly, kinda… How this happens is held within the kick drum, the measured beats lag and insist you sway and loll around outside and inside your body. Extremely sensitive in its dynamic, music like this has to be kept under a tight rein. Collaboration between the drummer and whoever’s running the melodies over the architecture the bassist is nailing down is completely necessary or it just becomes loud ambient stomping. Which, of course, has its place, like the more grind/industrial-affiliated units out there.

However, this is still firmly in the rock world, stoner-doom if you will. Unyielding as Elaborations… seems in its grittier aspects, following how the vocal register kicks in the lower-toned singing/growling, the guitar’s melodic presence (within its world, not “melodic” like an Oasis kinda thing), entertains the notion the guitar guy spent some quality time playing along with “The Temple of Syrinx”** and Budgie’s “Nude Disintegrating Parachute Woman.” Only a real stupe would be dull enough to suggest this isn’t a good one.
(PO Box 1624 Spokane, WA 99210)

* Monster Magnet’s Hawkwind-inspired space rock record. It’s great.
** Rush. Off 2112. Dude, what the fuck, you too sober to think straight?