Readings & Talks
newyorker.com
June 26, 2017 Issue
YOB's Doom Metal Gets Brighter
Mike Scheidt and his band return to Brooklyn with a reinvigorated sense of purpose.
By Benjamin Shapiro
Aaron Rieseberg, Mike Scheidt, and Travis Foster play three nights in Greenpoint.
Illustration by Daniel Zender
Mike Scheidt is the guitarist and vocalist behind YOB, which practices an extreme style of rock called doom metal. The music is bleak and slow, and tends to follow a format codified on early Black Sabbath records: spiritualist-satanic homilies sung over pitched-down guitar riffs played at a trudge. Most bands don't stray far from the script, for fear of the dreaded "false metal" tag. But the genre's strict posturing suggests that feelings of actual doom are not necessarily required.
The pain that Scheidt brings to his performance, however, extends far beyond mere aesthetics. He is disarmingly open about his personal problems, which include a history of clinical depression and struggles with eating disorders. He is also intensely thoughtful—a friend referred to him as "a Zen yogi-master type"—and offers an intellectual, vulnerary take on a genre that often borders on juvenilia. At forty-six, Scheidt is husky and covered in tattoos, with a flower-power haircut and circular John Lennon glasses. He is a regular meditator, and the opener of YOB's excellent album "Clearing the Path to Ascend," from 2014, is punctuated by recordings of the British philosopher Alan Watts. YOB songs, which often exceed fifteen minutes, are contemplative incantations similar to chakra-alignment music. But Scheidt, for all his solemnity, is a crusher of a guitarist, a vocal force, and a gripping songwriter, touching on themes of depression, spirituality, and transcendence.
This past January, while grocery shopping not far from his home, in Eugene, Oregon, Scheidt was struck with a violent pain down his left side that froze him in the aisle. "It was the kind of pain that stopped my mind—that touched on a mortal sense of fear," he told me recently. The cause turned out to be a severe case of acute diverticulitis, an intestinal disease. He was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent surgery a few days later, and YOB's tour was postponed indefinitely. With the help of his fans, who banded together to raise nearly thirty thousand dollars to help with his medical bills, he can work again, and has set upon making up for lost time, and gigs.
YOB returns to New York for a three-night stand at Saint Vitus, the Greenpoint metal bar, June 23-25. Attendees can expect a group with a reinvigorated sense of purpose. "We all feel the same way," Scheidt told me, describing "this heightened feeling of love for each other and our music—that we're intact after all of this." His recovery has brought on smaller changes as well. "I'm wearing less black," he said—a bold move for a metalhead. "I'm attracted to color." ♦
Published in the print edition of the June 26, 2017, issue, with the headline "The Seer."
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