Yoo Doo Right: From The Heights of Our Pastureland – Album Review

Canadian experimental rock trio Yoo Doo Right return with their third album. As the world enters full steam into an age of uncertainties, the band questions the cost of “progress” on humanity and the world. Louder Than War Radio DJ Adam Brady seeks the answers.

It can be said of many a thing that you never forget your first time. For me, it was the Saturday after Show 70 that I opened with single Eager Glacier, when I was walking Bella the cat in the grounds of our flat which, after eight years of being owned by her shows how well she has me trained.

Yoo Doo Right are sent to release their third album From The Heights Of Our Pastureland on 8th November via Mothland. Listening to it on that Saturday night is a walk I’ll never forget, for it was the first time I listened to the album in its entirety. Justin Cober (guitar, synths, vocals), Charles Masson (bass), and John Talbot (drums and percussion) have created, for me, a late contender for any and all Album Of The Year lists.

Conceptually, the album’s focus is on “the storm of colonialism, the collapse of capitalism and the massive undertaking it is to rebuild with past mistakes taken into deep consideration”. Having been conceived during the winter of 2023 whilst being snowed in a remote cabin close to Saguenay, QC and playing for three days straight, and its recording and ultimate laying down with producer Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, RI, there is also an environmental thread to the album as well.

Opening track Spirit’s Heavy, But Not Overthrown (split into two parts, depending upon format) is 13 minutes and 19 seconds of sonic and lyrical righteousness. The only track to feature vocals, it forces the listener to focus on the album’s subject matter, and it’s a focus that narrows with each listen:

We took this land with calloused hands, 
Concrete rivers flow with fervent haste,
Spirit’s heavy, but not overthrown,
We overlook the valley from our pastureland,
As steam escapes our mouths in the coolness of the morning,
All wheels stand still if we want them to,
All wheels stand still.

Colonialism, capitalism, “progress”, the environment.

Second single (and the track that made me very literally go “Oh yes!”) begins the instrumental majority of the album. The opening drums that power the song are hypnotic and tribal/primal, with the guitar layers redolent of arctic and glacial winds. The chinking of chains suggesting the death knell of ice floes, or even the shackles of forcibly moved peoples from their ancient traditional lands (as an aside, I’m seeing more and more labels and PR companies from old British Empire territories have in their email signatures acknowledgement that they work and live on land that was not ceded by the indigenous populations. They name them too, so that they are not forgotten, and neither is the scourge of what the Empire did; “progress”).

Ponders End, Lost In The Overcast, and the eponymous title track comprise the second half of the album. Ponders End, ambiguous in title whilst not provocative of thought, continues the heavy motorik aural assault. As it progresses with each break it feels like a new pondering has begun, or been posed; a new question to find the answer to. The genius thing is that it is never the same question twice.

Lost In The Overcast is a more subdued, almost ambient piece akin to Marconi Union’s Signals from 2021. The synths play lullaby riffs over a heartbeat drumbeat with gentle guitar licks adding a melancholic air to proceedings. It’s a beautiful coda to what has come before it.

The album’s title track From The Heights Of Our Pastureland closes with measured ferocity; a melodically angry bass giving a fluid movement for layered guitars that pick up gears as it reaches crescendo, all the while heavy use of bass drum and snare give the track a bite that just doesn’t let go.

For all the heaviness and experimental nature of the music and the deep and philosophical nature of the inspirations for the album there is always present a vein of hope.

It can be said, oft by me in all sincerity and in jest, that it is hope that kills you. The hope contained within From The Heights Of Our Pastureland, the hope that colonial atrocities, whichever imperial power committed them, might one day be repaired, that society and wealth can be made more equal, that progress need not mean oppression and repression of people and planet, might just be enough for us to get through our Sisyphean existence.

From The Heights of Our Pastureland will be released November 8 on Mothland, and can be purchased from the label itself on vinyl or CD or via Bandcamp on vinyl, CD, and digitally.

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All words by Adam Brady