Review by Sonny for YOB - Our Raw Heart (2018)

A lengthy album of stonerized doom and sludge metal that veers from heartfelt longing to dissonant aggressiveness and back again. Mike Scheidt's clean vocals are on top form and are filled with emotional resonance, never more so than in the opener, Ablaze, the album's best track in my opinion, with it's epic, yet sorrowful atmosphere. This is followed by The Screen, a song dripping with aggressive, sludge-drenched dissonance and the album's most angry-sounding track. In Reverie begins with a solitary bass line, before erupting into life with huge, heaving riffs that shake to the roots of the earth. Lungs Reach appears, at first, to be a gentle respite before exploding into a short, desperate maelstrom. The album's longest track at sixteen minutes is up next. Beauty in Falling Leaves is one of the more melodic tracks YOB have ever written and has an atypically hopeful and even joyous atmosphere within it's doom riffing. After the more upbeat emotion of Beauty.., Original Face is the polar opposite, with a death doom vibe that is more savage in it's uptempo pacing than is usual for the band and acts as a bridge between the album's two longest songs. Closing the album is the title track, which is another doomy stoner epic, nearly quarter of an hour long, which builds and builds to a psych-guitar crescendo.

With some nice variety in the tracks, the album's seventy-odd minute length doesn't feel at all excessive. A great example of an experienced band that can continue to turn out interesting and engaging records, despite working in a genre with fairly tight conventions.