The best music writing I did this year was in my review of YOB’s Clearing The Path To Ascend, but rather than repost my entire review here, I’ll leave you with the two sentences that matter:

“YOB are the best doom band in the world today, and Clearing The Path To Ascend is the best doom album you’ll hear this year. It is, quite possibly, the best metal album you’ll hear this year, maybe the best album of the year, period.”

Clearing The Path To Ascend isn’t in the top spot on this list, and I’m OK with that decision. But I’ll tell you this, too: When it came time to cast my vote for the year’s best album — both here and in the balloting for Stereogum’s Top 50 list — I pulled the lever for YOB.

Even in a year full of big albums, Clearing The Path To Ascend felt HUGE. Of course, that’s nothing new for the Portland, OR doom trio, who’d released six albums of elephantine majesty leading up to the new one, but Clearing The Path To Ascend is massive even by the band’s own standards. That thundering grandeur is evident in the album’s spiritualistic lyrical themes as well as the music, built like a castle using only four component parts — guitar, bass, drums, vocals — each one galloping through the mix with the fury and bombast of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse across the sky. That charge is led by frontman/visionary Mike Scheidt, one of modern metal’s truly great artists: a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist with few if any peers. Clearing The Path To Ascend is YOB at their most frenzied (“Nothing To Win”) as well as their gentlest (“Marrow”), but taken as whole, its four songs feel like the seasons or the elements: powerful, eternal, wondrous, and bigger than all of us. –Michael [LISTEN]