Send "Baroness " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Dustedmagazine |
 Baroness’ rock is both intricate and blunt, and like most music that’s intricate and blunt, is easiest to classify as metal. Sure enough, they’re neck deep in the scene, recording for a premier label and doing artwork for Guitar World. Staring at frontman John Baizley’s Art Nouveau jacket art, you can glimpse what sets them apart, though. Like their album titles (this one follows up Red Album), there is a conspicuous absence of heavy metal’s favorite color and mood. Baroness don’t have much about them that’s black. Leaving out darkness would seem to be as fatal as ditching overdrive or the kick drum, and it’s not completely absent. They do slash through minor scales and kachugga-chugga plods, tones that would metalicize middle-of-the-road rock. But for metal, Blue Record is uplifting. When the twin lead guitars lock in with each other and spiral up though notes together, it’s bright, bright stuff – southern rock, essentially, and it makes up meaty sections of the songs here. But just as often, it’s simple; icy notes hang in the air while Baizley howls listlessly and rhythms grind like machines. Their mix of purplish doom and filigree follows naturally from the band’s history. While they’ve been divided between metro areas – Atlanta, Savannah and New York – all the members all hail from Lexington, Virginia. Lexington is one of those of college towns in the mountains where the three-guitar jam is the cardinal sound, yet there’s enough churn in the culture that localboys could get their hands on underground tunes. Twenty miles further out, not so many options. If it weren’t for the shared youth, the prog-not-prog twists might not come so logically....full text |
| Stonerrock |
| This is definitely not the same band that released a succession of two stunningly heavy EPs a few years back. It's actually not even the same band that released The Red Album just a couple of years ago, as they've had a lineup change, incorporating Valkyrie's Pete Adams on guitar and vocals. While the change isn't immediately noticeable, his contributions become less subtle as the album progresses. Baroness toted Red Album as their "rock album." Fair enough, and in that context, Blue Record could be considered their prog album, as it takes the grandiose tendencies and epic arrangements they displayed so well on their initial full length, and follows those ideas through to their logical next levels. Of course, this could just as easily be called Baroness's "disco album," due to the prevalence of disco beats in the drumming. It's certainly an album that's all over the place stylistically, so repeatedly copping Kiss' "I Was Made For Loving You" doesn't really detract from the album in the slightest, especially when the drum sound is so huge. All the sounds on this album are great, there are some great guitar tones that really jump out of the mix, much in the same way that they did the first time I heard Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me. And while we're on that subject, some of these songs are basically indie rock played loudly. Take "Swollen and Halo" for example, which foregoes any heavy riffing, and relies more on the melodic octave guitar lines that were so prominent in 90's alternative rock. "Steel That Sleeps The Eye" also brings out the less-than-heavy aspects of the band; it's a beautiful acoustic ballad with a backwash of keyboards and/or sound effects, and it flows thematically and musically right into "Swollen and Halo."...full text |
| Treblezine |
| Two years after the fact and I'm still having trouble naming a debut album from the past few years as kickass as Baroness' Red Album. Of course, "debut" is a subjective term—the Savannah, Ga. group had released two EPs prior to that, named First and Second, respectively. So by the time they released their first full-length effort, they were more than prepared; their sound was more colossal and streamlined than ever, somehow creating a holy trinity of Mastodon's burly sludge, Fugazi's jagged post-hardcore urgency and Mogwai's slow-burning post-rock intricacy. To call them a metal band only told part of the story, though the heaviness was definitely there. But with second proper album Blue Record arriving two years later, Baroness has evolved into even more melodic and psychedelic territory, issuing an album that not only lives up to the promise of its predecessor, but in some ways surpasses it. In the broadest sense, Blue Record is an awe-inspiring and powerful rock `n' roll album, albeit one that still finds the band incorporating the heaviness and the hard-hitting surge of post-hardcore. Yet the group's tendency toward atmospheric epics have been compartmentalized into brief interludes, while their bigger songs have been packed with meatier hooks and a dizzying array of psych- and Southern-rock riffs. In short, if you're in the mood to hear something loud and awesome this should adequately floor you. As the slow, but brief acid swirl of opener "Bullhead's Psalm," rife with harmonized soloing, opens the album, it's apparent that the listener is being pulled into a dense and intriguing sonic world this time around. Yet just as that minute-long teaser subsides, in comes the dense powerhouse of "The Sweetest Curse," which displays the band at their most furiously direct. Low-end churn and dynamite riffs courtesy of new guitarist Pete Adams thunder beneath John Dyer Baizley's menacing howls. It incorporates much of what made Baroness so formidable before, only in more accessible form. The same goes for "Jake Leg," a fists-in-the-air anthem reminiscent of Red Album's "Wanderlust." It's heavy and it's loud, and, above all, it's rock and fucking roll....full text |
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