Music / Bristol
Review: Yob/Black Cobra, Fleece
The Fleece is fairly quiet when San Francisco’s Black Cobra pitch up on stage, but they certainly make up for that by creating a hell of a racket for a duo. In the blue corner, we have Jason Landrian’s distorted guitar and growled vocals. In the red corner is drummer Rafael Martinez. What makes them interesting is that Martinez plays his drums like a lead instrument, providing much of the colour and texture. Musically, they run the gamut from doom to thrash (which is presumably mandatory given their San Franciscan heritage), but the limitations of the rock duo format are all too apparent.
One of the things that’s missing from Black Cobra’s sound is a big bottom end, missus, which is not an accusation one can throw at the Oregon trio who bring the delightful term Yob back to rock for the first time since the glory days of Dave Hill. Founding guitarist/vocalist Mike Scheidt serves up crushingly heavy slo-mo riffage underpinned by Aaron Rieseberg’s gut-punching bass, creating a hypnotic mighty wall of sound that is, for the most part, a tad more uptempo than such peers as Sleep and Pallbearer. Yob take their time too. Much of their latest and most accomplished album, Clearing the Path to Ascend, gets an airing – and since this comprises just four songs, the shortest of which runs to a sprightly eleven-and-a-half minutes, there’s plenty of opportunity to hit and develop a groove that locks the threesome and their now packed congregation into a cathartic outbreak of synchronised headbanging.
If there’s a problem here, it is that one glorious song stands head and shoulders above all Yob’s other material and they throw it away a little too early in the set. Clocking in just shy of 20 minutes, Marrow is the concluding track on Clearing the Path to Ascend and functions as a perfect summation of their genre-transcending melange of disparate influences from prog to doom metal. Scheidt’s gorgeous, atmospheric introductory guitar figure sets up an almost shoegazey section with mournful vocals that proceeds, via a delicate breakdown, to a crescendo whose euphoria belies its funereal pace. After that, everything else feels like a bit of an anti-climax.
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: October 2016
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