When they started making burly, progressive sludge almost 10 years ago, Baroness weren't teenagers: They were grown men with a refined, nuanced approach to heavy metal. Even in 2003, it wasn't your typical Southern sludge swamp. That said, I doubt anyone listening then could've predicted Yellow & Green. The quartet's new 18-song, 75-minute double album offers a broad, rich expanse of pretty, psychedelic, occasionally heavy, mostly straight-up rock that veers easily into pop, post-rock, and lulling ambient washes. There are a number of new elements to Baroness in 2012-- frontman John Baizley is the father of a young daughter and lives in Philadelphia instead of Savannah; after the recording of Yellow & Green, Matt Maggioni came on board as the group's new bassist (which means longtime member Summer Welch is no more). The sound itself is the biggest shift, though it shouldn't come as a total surprise. They've hinted at these new avenues, and even tentatively explored a few, on their first two LPs, Blue Record and Red Album. What's surprising here is how well it all works.
There's almost always some filler on a record of this length-- it's a casualty of double albums-- but there's an impressive scarcity of it here. Even the songs that float by more humbly, or as background music, ultimately have a place in the overall dynamic by the first or second listen. And they are all songs. Take the "themes" that open Yellow and Green, respectively, the warm, aqueous two minutes of "Yellow Theme", the more drifting, airy, chilly (and post-rock anthemic) four-and-a-half minutes of "Green Theme". These are beautiful instrumentals, compositions with actual force and not more incidentals.
I recently interviewed Baizley about the record. He detailed how the group's idea of heaviness shifted from their early days to the present. He explained that "tricks" like "10 amplifiers on stage, a ton of volume, and notes on [a] guitar that were more appropriate for bass guitar" were a kind of "artifice to mask youthful songwriting." In the present, the group is more focused on subtlety: "Now that songs have become more important to us, we're trying to find the more nuanced, more appropriate-for-us idea of heavy." Yellow & Green showcases this new take in spades. As Baizley put it, "the Baroness-circa-2012 definition of heavy [is] not a tuning and it's not necessarily a volume; it's more of a feeling or an idea or some goal post that we're headed towards." And, practically speaking, the cleaner singing is a kind of survival tactic: His and backup vocalist Pete Adams' vocal cords couldn't continue along the raw, shouting path they'd set for themselves earlier on.
Baizley stressed that, although it's a double LP, Yellow & Green is not a concept record. That said, one theme certainly leaps out: that of aging, and the ways it changes our ideas surrounding music from one stage of adulthood to the next. Albums that force artists to go deep into themselves as people and as musicians tend to end up as accidental concept records, collections that document the time they pushed themselves to create, and the life they were otherwise living at that time. But this one feels very closely aligned to getting closer to 40, to feeling your bones creak a little more, your eyes getting a little weaker.
It's in the lyrics with words that fixate on disappearances, fractures, sleep, bruises, bracing for death, failing hearts, and saying goodnight to your father. Or there's the nostalgia of a line like, "when we were kids we never felt so young, take me to a hazy Sunday morning." Then again, we also get plenty of blood ("this apple makes me sick, says this pig upon the stick, it's my own blood") and water, as both baptism and drowning, or beginning and end. (A track like "March to the Sea" has water in its title, but there's something about its musicality that brings to mind early-1990s post-rock, too, and that post-Slint, June of 44-style obsession with anchors and sails.)
John Congleton, who also produced Blue, again gels perfectly with the band. Each song has levels and layers: It's an album for headphones as well as one for lighters in the middle of a smoky club. You get weird gurgles of noise, shimmering deep layers of sound, electronic swirls. "Twinkler" is like a downcast campfire greek chorus; "Cocainium" has that kind of ambiance, too, but picks up the drum beat-- it's a variation on psychedelic pop that made me think of the Turtles until the muscular bass, distorted guitars, and grungy chorus.
Baizley said the cover art, and the songs themselves, reflect the feeling of the moment before or after a disaster; of course, these are very different feelings, but I know what he means. It's not all waiting around and recovering. There's pure climactic catharsis, as you'd expect from Baroness, but these tracks work in a way Baroness songs haven't previously. Instead of explosions, billows, and howls, we get a more meditative air, even on some of the bigger rockers like "Take My Bones Away" or the rollicking "Board Up the House". Each mountain is chased with something a littler gentler. It's thrilling hearing people this technically adept holding back a little, showing restraint, and cramming what they know into a pop nugget. It's what Torche have done well in the past, especially on Meanderthal, but it's bigger, more spacious and stadium-sized here. (Like if Torche actually were the Foo Fighters.)
One of these climaxes is "Eula", the heart-crushing finale to Yellow, seven minutes of crisp acoustics, atmospheric (and anthemic) vocals, and warped chiming sounds that accompany descriptions of bones breaking, a house becoming a cage-- in other words, the end of something. But it's not: "Eula" ushers in the more pastoral Green, which also stands on its own as a great record. After the main "Green" theme comes "Board Up the House", a bit of shout-along rock'n'roll with a Radiohead-like approach to percussive filters and shifts. Elsewhere on this half there's the thorny Fahey-pop of "Stretchmarker" and a dose of chewy pop-metal via "The Line Between", another possible single. It ends with "If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry", an outro like the Yellow opening: We get that slippery, aqueous sound again.
I've always liked the elegance of the group's primary-color schemes-- topical, clearly delineated ways to make each album feel like a whole. Here, more than anywhere else, the colors aren't needed: These songs stick together well without a framework. Tracks play off each other, make echoes, and then go on. Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic." During a video interview we did with the band, Baizley joked that you should go for a run, walk your dog, or otherwise take a break from Yellow & Green at the end of the first half, before venturing into the second. The halves do elegantly mirror each other-- each with its nine songs, intro, and finale-- and a pause could make sense. But I prefer listening to the entire thing from start to finish. This is an impressive effort, one that involved a lot of heavy lifting, and it's best experienced with that sort of commitment.
