I’m always super disappointed when bands that used to be loud and edgy mellow out and get boring. Of course, mellowing out (or maturing) doesn’t automatically have to be unexciting – I really like Snapcase’s End Transmission, for example, but for every Snapcase I could probably name ten Small Brown Bikes. Luckily, the Yellow & Green album by Baroness falls into the End Transmission category: they have matured, gotten slower, tried new things …and it’s great. They significantly expanded their sound, substituted most of the screaming with singing, and apparently had enough material to put it on two CDs. It was a brave step but I think it paid off.
“Eula,” the last song on the Yellow side of the album, is representative of the whole thing: it starts off slowly with an acoustic guitar and plaintive vocals, builds towards a great key change, and then hits you with a Rage-Against-the-Machine-style guitar solo that comes out of nowhere. This kind of change can also be found in “Little Things” or in the melodies that “Back Where I Belong” or “Mtns. (The Crown and Anchor)” develop into. There is always something happening in the songs.
That you could play a lot of this to your girlfriend who hates metal, shows how far this is removed from their previous stuff. There are actually some really beautiful parts on there: just listen to the beginning of “Mtns.,” the underwater feel of “Collapse,” or “Twinkler,” which makes me wish that the dwarves will sing a Baroness song in the next Hobbit movie. In “Little Things” and “Cocainium,” you get some Baroness dance beats and “Stretchmarker” could also appear on Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack (I’m serious. But I mean that as a compliment) – definitely something I never thought I’d say about a Baroness song. Except for the Foo-Fighters-like “The Line Between,” the Green album moves even further beyond their previous CDs – it’s slower, more melancholy, and there is hardly any room for playing air guitar.
Old Baroness always remind me of Jack Black doing the metal sign and yelling “let’s fucking ROCK!” And while this impulse was definitely much more prominent on the old Baroness CDs, it’s still there on Yellow & Green. There is a series of YouTube clips the band posted, in which they discuss the recording process of the CD. In one of them, the guitarist talks about the solos on the CD: that they don’t just start off but come in guns blazing …and fucking rock. And he’s absolutely right. Nonetheless, Baroness are not just there to fucking rock anymore. They leave more room for the actual song and there is more focus on different layers, sounds, and experimenting with new elements. Of course, it has also its flaws. I’m not really into the second song on the Green album and think that “If I forget thee, lowcountry” is just too anticlimactic as the closer. And rhyming “thing” with “everything” in “Little Things” kind of ruins the chorus for me. All in all, though, they have managed to write songs that are absolutely timeless and quite epic at the same time. While a lot of bands end up going in directions where I don’t want to follow them, Baroness have moved into a direction where I really want to follow and I am very excited to see what’s next.
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