Like prophets, Savannah, Ga., metal quartet Baroness named its earliest releases First and Second. Their third-- and first for Relapse Records-- is called Red Album, and it's seven minutes longer than its predecessors combined. It's also more ambitious, more accomplished, simply bigger: Here, the ideas Baroness have offered since 2003-- a colossal, airtight rhythm section backing sludge-of-the-South vocals and guitars-- are realized with purpose and aim.
Of the four current genuinely unorthodox metal bands from Georgia-- Mastodon, Harvey Milk, Kylesa (whose Phillip Cope produced Red Album), and Baroness-- it's Baroness that are perhaps the most comely. The band shares some of the most appealing traits of its fellow statesmen-- Mastodon's steaming guitar trips, Harvey Milk's teasing maneuvers and crushing payoffs, Kylesa's generally crusty countenance. But on Red Album, those qualities culminate into a dynamic, moving landscape, full of unexpected pitfalls, lifts, and classic bait-and-switches. The album's most energetic coda, for instance, collapses into a contemplative piece for finger-picked acoustic guitar, and its most ferocious pocket of thrash has winding instrumentals for bookends.
Baroness juggle motifs and ideas, making patterns only to toss them and catch them later. Ascendant, spectral guitar phrases ease the album in, supplying the sort of radiant hum that shaped Brian Eno's Music for Airports. Cymbal splashes and aberrant notes tease that flow, obliterating it when the guitar finds its theme and the drums land their mid-tempo, kick-and-tom gallop. But the next 15 minutes are pure power. Intervening tracks "Rays on Pinion" and "Isak" turn laptop speakers into arsenals of cannons and automatic weapons. John Baizley's voice is dually capable of shouting down a spirit or etching melody from the same monolithic growl, and his guitar interplay with Brian Blickle is all energy. But four tracks in, those introductory ebbs wash back, slightly less predictable and graceful. Before they seemed pure, but now-- as drummer Allen Blickle pounds away in the encroaching distance-- things are panicked. Tongue-and-groove guitarmonies sometimes lift the band's reins, letting the rhythm section flip tempos just beneath. On "Aleph", Baroness even inverts that pattern, killing the rhythm to let the piercing, lock-and-key guitars diverge and cobweb into silence through long, corroding riffs.
As replete as it is with changes, Red Album's relation to prog runs the risk of being overstated at the sake of Southern rock, the Georgia bone-and-blood genre that, at its best, challenged prog as a dynamic equal and emotional master. When Baroness are swiveling through intertwining, fast-fingered melodies like those of "The Birthing" or letting the big, bouncy groove of "Pinion" stand alone, they're channeling a local lineage that began in Macon with the Allmans. And on the acoustic "Cockroach en Fleur", Baroness nod more to the mountain music one state up and to the humid blues two states over than to trans-Atlantic psychedelia or prog-minded folk. The source of those sidetrips-- Southern steam over proggy smarts-- has two consequences: Red Album, full of Baizley lyrics about bearing the world's load and "resign[ing] ourselves to soar home," is a workhorse. Most importantly, though, is Baroness' consistent return to a comfortable, languid groove after every excursion. The album roars and creeps, but it's best when it's somewhere in between, riding a slightly above-mid-tempo pace.
Red Album stands to lose Baroness a clutch of longtime devotees, wont to damn these simmering textures and time-lapse payoffs in favor of First and Second's maul and fervor. But it's the type of album that can help a band begin to gain a Mastodon-sized legion. The double-guitar chug and dirty-bass thrum of "The Birthing"-- juxtaposed as they are with Baizley's distended, growling melody-- are readymade for today's dominant mixed metal crowd, where half of a room loses its mind near the stage as the other more stoic half nods at the pit's perimeter. And, in Baroness' case, that's perfectly fine: Purity's never been a concern. It's just that, on Red Album, the band's disparate cores finally have more space and more effect. The textures have become holistic atmospheres, the peaks anthemic strongholds, and the clashes unavoidable cataclysms. When they intersect in the middle, Red Album is hard to doubt.
