BARONESS - Blue Record

While they're not quite The Doors, the many purveyors of vintage-era Southern rock (i.e. Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allmans) have not exactly slid easily into the enduring annals of 'what's cool.' Numbing decades of shouted concert requests for "Freebird" (both ironic and non-) and a permanent station on that most unchanging of radio formats known as 'classic rock' will do that for you. Which is all a shame, because those are some great records. This is what makes a band like Baroness so exciting. Like fellow Georgians Mastodon, these are gentlemen who instantly understand the significance of the General Lee. More importantly, they know how to take the legendary multi- guitar attack of Southern rock and transform it to their own needs in a way that is equal parts reverent and progressive.

Their first full-length, the much-praised Red Album, established Baroness as a keen amalgamation of many other influences—the new wave of British Heavy Metal, hardcore, ambient drone, post-rock—but Blue Record's mood is a little different. While hardly uniform in tone or style, this album is just a little more, well, Southern. It's in the ways that the guitars harmonize, the way that the record grooves more than pummels. For all of its testosterone power, though, the Blue Record is quite relaxed, an ease that's at certain times more obviously displayed than at others. "Sleep That Steels The Eye" is like The Moody Blues meeting Alice In Chains' Sap EP, and several instrumental interludes provide tender sinews with which to stitch together the album's more muscular moments. But when they do hit with their maximum wallop, there's just enough attention to arrangement and dynamics to keep the record a warm one overall, rather than one that just blows hot and then cold. It's a small detail to be sure, but it makes all the difference.