BLUE RECORD (BY) BARONESS

Progressive Sludge Metal / Southern Rock
Released 2009

When I put together my Top 10 Albums of 2009 list at the end of last year, I spent weeks scouring blogs and forums and online review sites looking for any albums I might have missed.  But even with all my intended thoroughness, I still made one glaring error.  The Blue Record got a lot of press after its October release, and ended up on many "best of the 2009" metal lists, often finishing in the top 3.  So I downloaded it, listened to it, and decided it was worth keeping around, but it didn't grab me right away.  Every now and then I gave it another spin, until eventually, only a week or two after I published my own Top 10, I suddenly found myself playing the Blue Record more and more and more.  By early January I was listening to almost nothing else.  It's an album that's perfect for any mood or occasion, that I can always throw on after work and find myself caught up in its infectious energy no matter how dull or shitty my day has been.  The Blue Record deserves to be spun all summer long, but it got me through an entire winter.  It's one of the few albums that stands as entertainment of its own right, a soundtrack to 45 minutes of spastic air-drumming.

The thing is, I can pinpoint exactly why Baroness didn't grab me at first.  They're from the elite Georgian school of sludge metal, the same state that's also somehow brought us Mastodon, Torche and Kylesa.  I like all these bands well enough, except for one thing: their vocals.  If you've heard any of them, you know what I'm talking about, because their vocals are all pretty much the same, down to the rhythm and structure.  Each verse is pretty much delivered like this: shout shout shout / shout shout YELLLLLLL.  It's simple and repetitive, and the "drunken bearded man shouting at a bar" vibe always really turned me off.  A lot of metal has this problem, from Isis-derived post-metal to stoner metal and back to sludge.  Not that metal vocals are inherently bothersome, of course — the ones that work, work really goddam well — but that metal listeners tend to be unnecessarily forgiving of genuinely bad vocals.  As much as I respect all of the above bands, I could only take them in small doses because of their vocals. 

Baroness was no different, but I sensed that the music underneath was within my tastes, moreso than their more traditional peers.  For one thing, Baroness isn't nearly as classically sludgey as, say, Mastodon was with their first few releases, nor nearly as wanky-prog-metal-y as Mastodon became with their latest effort.  There's an unmistakable southern vibe to the music, down to the folky acoustic interlude "Blackpowder Orchard" and it wonderfully compliments Baroness' unrelenting, upbeat energy — like a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Melvins with the record player set at 45 rpm instead of 33.  Instead of wasting all their time trying to find the [fucking] heaviest [fucking] guitar tone ever [dudeeee] Baroness sends nearly every song galloping out of the gate with a stampede of drums and riffs so blazing, you may find yourself spontaneously air-guitaring on a crowded subway platform.  [Not that I've experienced this myself. I've... read about it.]  Instead of morphing into some prog-metal, seizure-inducing bonanza, Baroness keeps every song tight and perfectly coordinated, each filled with a ton of texture, little tangents and details and experiments enough to still earn it the "progressive" label, but these elements are always secondary to the pacing of the song, instead of being responsible for it.  Baroness never meanders enough to get distracted.  Songs move fast, almost too fast to keep track of.  The drums are unrelentingly propulsive, like this album is being shot at you out of a cannon.  Yet it's fun.  It's coherent.  It's never boring, it never loses focus, because these guys have their style down to an art.  Baroness doesn't have to be the heaviest band on the scene when the Blue Record contains some of the tightest song-writing you'll ever find south of the Mason-Dixon line.

So after a few listens, something strange happened: I grew to not mind those vocals.  Then, inevitably, I guess I liked them.  Now I can't imagine the Blue Record without them — shouty and rough and incredibly repetitive though they may be, no other style would really fit the energy and intensity of Baroness' music, and I dare say they work much better here than over the slow, heavy march of other sludge bands.  The Blue Record is pretty intense, and dense as well, yet even at its most technical it never loses sight of being fun.  (And there's nothing wrong with metal being fun).  This is an album I want blasting from my porch all summer long.  This is that album that makes me want to own a car again, badly, just so I can rock out to it while tearing down the highway with the windows down.  This album will give you whiplash.