When Baroness appeared at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in mid-June, the set marked only their 19th public performance in America since the release of their double album, Yellow & Green, nearly a year before. While on tour in Europe last August, just a month after issuing that ambitious record, the band’s tour bus careened through roadside barriers outside of Bath, England, and crashed violently into the woods beneath. The nine people in the bus suffered variable injuries, from cuts that got them out of the hospital quickly to, in the cases of drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni, fractured vertebrae. Those injuries ultimately led Blickle and Maggioni to quit Baroness. Touring no longer seemed feasible.
For that matter, no one in the band-- including frontman John Baizley-- knew when or if touring would even be possible again for Baroness. But seven months later, Baizley closed a letter to fans on the band’s website with the words “‘til the wheels fall off”; Baroness would return to the road with a different lineup, he vowed, “where we belong.” So during that afternoon set in Tennessee, Baizley turned his back to the crowd, looked at the camera, bent backward, and threw up his arms with unabashed excitement-- the same right arm that had been burned in the crash, the left one that had been crushed in it. Behind him now, for as far as the lens could capture, a tent full of fans did the same thing, sharing in his stage-based homecoming. New scars, bad memories, replaced members and lingering pain be damned: Baroness was back.
A month before the accident in 2012, Baroness was two weeks into their two-month European tour when they stopped at the BBC’s studio at Maida Vale. They recorded an interview and four songs in Studio 4 with Dan Carter, host of Radio 1’s “Rock Show.” It seemed appropriate that Baroness would make their BBC debut in 2012 on a program named Rock Show; Yellow & Green, after all, shirked some of the more metallic, progressive, and punk qualities of the band’s earlier works, instead linking a string of would-be radio hits across a 75-minute set. Many critics suggested that tunes like the drifting blues of “Foolsong”, the three-minute threat of “Sea Lungs” or the irrepressible hook of “Take My Bones Away” might serve as Baroness’ conduit to new audiences-- listeners who knew the Foo Fighters but not necessarily Kylesa, Pink Floyd but not Eyehategod. PopMatters even invoked the phrase “stadium-worthy rock.” Indeed, among the very real pain of Baroness’ bus crash remains an untested hypothetical, too: Had Baroness never wrecked but instead spent the last year touring and playing late-night television and generally sharing Yellow & Green rather than recovering and restarting, could they now a very big rock band?
While Yellow & Green found Baroness brandishing big hooks and sharp production, the versions of four of those songs that they performed at Maida Vale display the same grit and drive for which Baroness first garnered acclaim. Gathered on a limited-edition, one-sided LP, these renditions are rather faithful to their Yellow & Green counterparts. Aside from “March to the Sea”, which accretes slowly through a wafting instrumental introduction, these takes reflect the lengths of their LP predecessors, with no extended twists or surprising turns. They do hit consistently harder than those on Yellow & Green, an album that some longtime Baroness fans dismissed as too soft or perhaps too ready for the radio. Blickle and Maggioni browbeat their way through the verses of “March to the Sea”, the separation between bass and drums found on Yellow & Green ceding to a more dense, bullying rendering. The crunch and churn of “Take My Bones Away” even threatens to swallow Baizley’s vocals whole, though they’re set so high and mighty above the band on the album. The rendition recalls the salad days of Baroness, when they roared through the Byzantine material from their first two EPs in punk houses and small clubs with tiny PAs, their extreme dynamic swings often burying Baizley in sound. Amid last year’s dual hubbubs about their newly sharpened rock songs and their subsequent crash, Live at Maida Vale preserves the memory of the pugnacious, strapping quartet at the center of it all.
Before their set at Bonnaroo, Baroness recorded an interview with Fuse’s Liz Walaszczyk backstage. After chatting about what they were excited to see at the festival, Walaszczyk idly asked Baizley and Adams how tour was going so far, at one point adding, “Isn’t touring exhausting?” But Adams talked with childlike enthusiasm about wanting to stay on the road with his friends indefinitely, about not wanting to go home for an upcoming two-week break. They were finally on the road in America, finally getting a chance to share what they’d done on Yellow & Green from the stage. A year after that record’s release, Live at Maida Vale is a swift and unfaltering reminder that Baroness has ground to make up-- and the spirit and songs with which to do it.
