Baroness – Gold and Grey (2019) album review

Track listing:

1. Front Toward Enemy (3:45)
2. I’m Already Gone (3:51)
3. Seasons (4:27)
4. Sevens (2:05)
5. Tourniquet (5:46)
6. Anchor’s Lament (1:40)
7. Throw Me an Anchor (4:01)
8. I’d Do Anything (4:10)
9. Blankets of Ash (1:04)
10. Emmett: Radiating Light (4:12)
11. Cold-Blooded Angels (5:38)
12. Crooked Mile (0:52)
13. Broken Halo (4:24)
14. Can Obscura (2:02)
15. Borderlines (6:16)
16. Assault on East Falls (2:19)
17. Pale Sun (4:14)

Every time I’ve attempted to listen to the new Baroness album in its entirety, I’ve felt like an angry construction worker has been torturing me with a power drill in the ears for the last 40 minutes.

And that’s not a knock against Baroness’s musical style. This Savannah, GA quartet has proven again and again that their passionate lyrical complexity can match well with the layered, flowery textures of their very hard-edged music. While I wouldn’t exactly call them progressive, Baroness has certainly pushed the envelope a few times on just how melodic and colorful stoner metal can be, and they’ve brought an intriguing blend of several non-metallic styles of indie rock, jazz, and punk to the table. In late 2015 they dropped Purple, an album which, while thematically fans could draw the conclusion that it would be a mix of their first two albums, Red and Blue, musically is perhaps their most accessible and likable record yet, filled with dynamic songwriting, passionate performances, and poetic lyrics. It was a metal album with all the beating heart of an indie pop record, and it was one of my favorite records of the year. Naturally, given a three and a half year wait, my expectations were high for the follow-up.

But nah, man, the real reason this album is so grating and difficult is its absolutely abhorrent production job. Purple, for all the praises I like to sing to it, definitely had sound issues that made some songs harder to love than they should’ve been, but even that was excusable given some of the powerful and beautiful songs on that album. Gold & Grey, however, is a different story. Baroness has been getting rougher and more bare-bones on their sound mixing throughout their discography, so when it reaches its breaking point here on this 17-song album, you know it’s an intentional stylistic choice, rather than laziness or ineptitude. The static, the feedback, the brickwalled drums, the layered vocals faded behind the mountains of guitar and drum noise, it’s all so dialed up to the point that you know Baroness was going for an amateur, lo-fi sound on this record. It’s a mush where the instruments are constantly in competition with each other in their abrasive loudness, and whoever wins, the listener always loses. No doubt they figured it would sound like a beautiful mess, in the most complimentary way. But it’s a hot mess. It’s all over the place. It’s not even consistent. At least when Rick Rubin lambasted the late-period comeback releases from ZZ Top, Metallica, and Black Sabbath, the sound was fat and noisy throughout, so you as the listener could make the proper adjustment to your sound system in order to be able to digest it in one sitting without having to noodle around throughout. Here, Baroness lays back a little bit on songs like “Seasons”, “Borderlines”, and “Cold-Blooded Angels”, and they’ll strip down the noise for a watery texture on the opening tones of “Tourniquet” and the slow jam “I’d Do Anything” only to ratchet back up without warning. Sonically, it almost sounds like Baroness has contempt for the listener, teasing them with solid songwriting, especially in “Throw Me an Anchor”, but preventing them from reaching any meaningful emotion by splashing hot water in their face with a mastering job that’s physically painful to listen to.

I can’t for the life of me guess why this band would make this call with their production, because it is truly terrible, and they’ve proven time and again that they know what they’re doing, musically speaking. That being said, I had my concerns when Baroness first announced this album, and I saw the lengthy track listing. While Gold & Grey isn’t a double album, the last time they put out an album of this length, Yellow & Green in 2012, it turned out to be very underwhelming overall. All of Baroness’s strengths just seemed drawn out and spread thin on that album, and there were only precious few songs like “Cocainium” that could stand up to their previous highlights like “Rays on Pinion”, “Swollen & Halo”, and “Wanderlust”. I worried history would repeat itself and Gold & Grey would be similarly overblown, and the singles “Borderlines” and “Seasons” didn’t do much to stir my enthusiasm, partly due to the fact the production had clearly gotten even worse since Purple. “Borderlines” especially came across as a filler track, reusing a lot of ideas from Purple‘s opening track “Morningstar” and not doing much to improve on them, and given that this was the first taste of the album, it boded pretty poorly. “Seasons” was more decent, especially given the surprising use of blast beats and a more atmospheric guitars, but it still left me wanting more, and not in a good way. “Throw Me an Anchor”, the album’s third single, turned out to be a great song underneath its derisive sound, but that sound was bad enough that the single’s video was littered with comments with concerned fans at how drastically unlistenable the song was, so I knew right then that it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t a style Baroness had chosen to please a certain demographic of fans, because the fans were actively decrying it.

It gets worse from here. The excitement with which the band seems to jump into these songs can’t really hold back the fact that very little about Gold & Grey is new territory for them. The biggest change since releasing Purple in 2015 has come with the addition of guitarist and backing vocalist Gina Gleason, who presumably contributed to the songwriting duties alongside frontman John Dyer Baizley. One positive I can say is that her voice, with its straight, clear tone, compliments the rougher exclamations coming from Baizley quite nicely, and was my main takeaway from the otherwise boring single “Borderlines”. They make for some pretty lovely harmonies at times, which is something Baroness has been gradually picking up more over the years. But for an offering of 17 songs, several of which are admittedly short ambient or acoustic interludes, Baroness never really takes flight with the songwriting. Perhaps more troubling, even on the cases like “Cold-Blooded Angels” and “Tourniquet”, two of the album’s better tracks, where the band shows some promise with an attempt at building a song more tastefully and less predictably, they just appear to arrive at the same plateaus. At least the melodies carrying them can vary in their levels of inspiration, and the lyrics are beautifully poignant and vivid, with lines like “Wasted years on an empty road where flies buzz around my head, now I miss the bitter hand that cut me down all the way to nothing”. As much as I do appreciate the poetry, I just wish the album lived up to it musically more often, rather than being applied with songs that sound like b-sides and leftovers from better albums. It makes me wonder, considering that the band announced Gold & Grey would be the last of their chromatically themed albums, if they’ve felt constricted by their thematic focus while making this album. Unlike the new 18-song Taylor Swift album, this isn’t really a case of quantity over quality; instead Baroness sounds creatively stifled, perhaps by the success of Purple and a need to lay back on their laurels and deliver more of the same. A lot more. In doing so, they haven’t delivered anything on par with “Shock Me”, “The Iron Bell”, or “Try to Disappear”. It’s an album that has worse sound and mixing than they’ve ever had, with songwriting as meandering as their previous weakest effort Yellow & Green.

Gold & Grey is quite possibly my biggest disappointment of 2019 thus far, the album I was most looking forward to, based on how great the band has been recently, that let me down the most dramatically. My hope is that this album will become a turning point for the band, that they’ll recognize the errors made here and capitalize on their lessons when they transition to new thematic territory on whatever comes next. But whatever happens, as long as John Baizley keeps killing it with his thoroughly compelling lyricism and his fantastic artwork (yes, he’s responsible for that awesome cover art as well), then whatever direction Baroness takes, it can’t be all bad. But I can’t recommend anyone listen to this album on a pair of headphones or speakers without a full range, and to anyone who’s new to Baroness, there are much, much better places to start anyway.