On Saturday, December 20th the Community Center for the Performing Arts proudly welcomes Yob to the WOW Hall.

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

“Slow is fast,” says Mike Scheidt, singer, guitarist, and creative nucleus of the Oregon-based doom metal trio YOB. It’s a concept that speaks to both the immense propulsion of their megalithic compositions and the way their artistry has patiently unfurled across their 25-year tenure. Change and revelation take time. You can’t snap yourself into epiphany and you can’t force yourself into another shape. You have to trudge. It doesn’t mean you’re failing. You persevere through the muck or you stop and you sink. There is no third way.

YOB’s music spreads across a plain where vast weather systems converge. Since sharing their first demo in 2000, the band has slowly, graciously gathered a devoted audience into their planetary orbit. Together with bassist Aaron Rieseberg and drummer Dave French, Scheidt tethers pendulous riffs to sky-flung vocals, sinking deep into the trenches and then cresting through the clouds. From the stoner rock ripples of their 2002 debut Elaborations of Carbon through the cavernous echoes of 2018’s Our Raw Heart, YOB wield their totalizing gravity to bore into the light that hides in everything.

Scheidt was reared on punk and metal in the eighties and nineties: parallel outsider ecosystems that lent language and dimension to deep feelings of unbelonging. “Music became for me what I think it is for everybody: an anchor,” he says. “It’s something that soothes; it’s something that lets you feel the intensity of anger without the damage of anger.” He turned toward doom after seeing Cathedral perform in Portland in the early nineties. “I was hanging out in the back. Then Cathedral started playing and it took maybe ten minutes for me to go from the back of the room to wedging myself against the front of the stage,” Scheidt remembers. “It changed my life. Before then I was in punk bands. After that, I started to play slower and lower.”

Toward the end of the nineties, Scheidt started writing songs in the stoner doom tradition of Black Sabbath and Sleep. He dubbed his new project YOB and submitted its first demo to stonerrock.com, one of many online musical communities that sprung up during the explosion of home internet service at the end of the millennium. At the time, Scheidt was busy parenting his three young children and didn’t expect the recording to lead to much. “I just submitted the demo because I wanted to be a part of the community,” says Scheidt. “There was no idea of anything beyond that. Life was very busy and I had other priorities. Everything that came afterwards was surprise after surprise after surprise.”