Baroness – Yellow & Green

July 17, 2012 • Relapse Records

I've been following Baroness since their first album, finding out about them through their similarity to Mastodon (probably like a lot of other people). I haven't listened to them much since their second album Blue Record was pretty disappointing, but Baroness has now gone in a totally different direction and gone are the crunchy metal guitars and sludgy aesthetics. I'm not sure if I'm totally sold on what Yellow & Green is offering but the end product is admirable, if nothing else.

From sludge metal to grooving hard rock—is the change good or bad? or neither? I don't know. They still have the same southern twang and the same penchant for writing some pretty catchy hooks, and there are more than a couple memorable choruses throughout. However I find their sound to be relatively tame and safe—I don't want to say "poppy", because it's not, but it's headed that way. In fact you could still say they're paralleling Mastodon's career with the increased accessibility (though Mastodon has still kept things pretty heavy, but that's neither here nor there). To me, at least, the songwriting is still good on a small-scale level—individual riffs and whatnot—but on a large-scale level it's a bit of a bore and some songs are really predictable.

Not to mention that even Baroness can't escape the curse of the double album. Nine out of ten double albums I hear are always half-crap and could be easily trimmed down to one good disc; Yellow is significantly better than Green so it seems at first like the whole thing is constistently good, but unfortunately it's not so. Only "Green Theme", "Board Up the House" (which wound up being my favorite track across both discs), and maybe "The Line Between" are particulary good on Green and could easily replace a few not-as-good tracks on Yellow for one killer album. (And no, it's not just because I prefer the heavier tracks. "Board Up the House" really isn't heavy.)

However despite my personal preferences for the individual songs, they still succeed decently enough at a double album—moreso than most bands—since they have really expanded their musical repertoire; Yellow & Green isn't just two discs of straight-up hard rock and there's plenty of psych, folky stuff, and some metal thrown in. Depending on the listener this can come off as inconsistent and patchworky; others might consider it ambitious and a display of Baroness' songwriting talent. I fit somewhere between those two and I can see it both as being a good thing and a bad thing.

I can tell I won't ever come to enjoy this album as much as I like their first two, as my appetite for this style of music was pretty low to begin with. On the other hand Blue Record was a step down and another sludge album probably wouldn't have been particularly good. Yellow & Green seems like an album you really have to sample for yourself to know if you'd like it or not since it's so different and almost seems like it's aiming at an entirely different audience. I dunno. Like I said, like it or not, it's still a pretty impressive album.

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