You may not have heard of Yob, even as a fan of doom you might not have known half of the bands on the line up for their show at the Purple Turtle on the 10th October 2011. That’s because Dead Existence, Dark Castle, Kongh and Yob lie within the deepest and darkest recesses of the underground of the underground. And yet some of these bands have reputations and followings that are able to fill the tiny Purple Turtle several times over.
The Turtle was packed by the time Dead Existence took to the tiny stage, a black and white gore movie projected onto the wall behind them. This London based band has taken influences that lie on extreme and unique places on the sonic spectrum and created a new one that incorporates Neurosis, Crowbar, Iron Monkey and even Mastodon in places.
Dark Castle sound like some sort of cosmic storm tearing up a field of psychedelic mushrooms, throwing them into a crashing sea that rains psychedelia on an entire civilisation which then experiences the 1960's for one thousand years. They have the groove of Kyuss, slowed down to an earth age of shuddering, hip busting organic funkiness that almost makes you expect a hallucination or two.
Kongh are a Swedish threepiece that converted a fair number with their eastern tinged rhythmic drive, edging towards the technical, then veering straight into the unprotected eardrums of every crowd member. The quality of sound that night was excellent and the huge bass flooded the room like a giant invisible force that grasped every available atom and shook the crowd into a daze.
The first thing that hits you about Yob is the colossal bass, even for a sludge ridden doom band they expel the stuff like a throbbing doom volcano on the verge of self destruction. Yob is the metamorphosis of Sleep, Electric Wizard, Om and Sabbath into an obsidian sound that stands out in a genre where it is so easy to fall back on cliché techniques and overused chords. Their most recent album Atma has pushed Yob closer into the downtuned limelight of the doom scene. Yob are most definitely worth a foray into the lower end of the sound spectrum if you did not catch their mighty and rare London show.
