Baroness - Gold & Grey

Never before have premonitions been as wary and nerves been as tense going into a new record from the mighty Baroness as they have been for Gold & Grey, the follow-up to the band’s fourth, and my favorite, album Purple, and the proclaimed finish to the band’s saga of color-themed records. And all this tension sprouted up after the release of the album’s first single, “Borderlines”, back in March, stemming from one irritating source: the song’s production. While Purple was a step toward a more compressed and hard-rock-oriented production style after Yellow & Green, the songs were so consistently ridiculously well-composed and powerful enough to outshine the slightly grainier production that the band were kind of able to get away with it. But Baroness really went all in on the over-compressed, fuzzy mixing on “Borderlines”, far more than anything on Purple, to the point of it being a seemingly intentional attempt to give their sound a more lo-fi feel. And this time, with “Borderlines” being one of the most meager lead singles in the band’s entire catalog, the songwriting did not outweigh the atrocious production. John Dyer Baizley sounds like he’s singing into drum microphone fed into a practice amp, the guitars are washed into this hazy white noise of mixing that becomes absolutely atrocious during the song’s finale with the bass all but disappearing into obscurity along the way, and the drums become homogenized and made unnecessarily difficult to discern in all the crackling. And after excitement about new material came and went, fans were not keen at all about this perplexing direction the band were taking behind the soundboard.

The second preliminary single, “Seasons”, was thankfully a much more convincing compositional exhibition that much better captured the soaring emotional bombast that characterized Purple, but the similarly compressed production, though not as bad as “Borderlines”, did not ease fans’ tensions. And Baizley seemed to be in complete denial about Dave Fridmann’s unflattering production job it from what I saw from fan interactions and challenges on the subject.

After finally getting to listen to the album in its entirety, though, I can thankfully say that while the production is still the worst of any Baroness album to date, it’s not as much of a distracting and negating factor as I and many others had initially thought it would likely be. With hindsight being 20/20 and all, “Borderlines” was definitely the worst single they could have led with, suffering more than any other song on the track list from the fuzzy muffling and claustrophobic compression of the mixing. The compression does fluctuate from song to song, thankfully, but it does make attentive, dissective listening more difficult, though not completely impossible, and hearing it in its more tempered doses, I can see what Baizley and company were shooting for with this production style. The mediated fuzz on the tracks more in line with Purple’s level of compression show the type of raw, somewhat old-school feel the band was shooting for, and it does give their sound that kind of vibe here, even if it comes kind of artificially without much compromise on the thickness of the instrumentation they like to use. They certainly didn’t go east on fans though by presenting this mix at its most obnoxious on “Borderlines” before anything else.

Stylistically, Gold & Grey is a continuation of Purple’s refining of the less-sludgy-more-catchy heavy metal sound that started with Yellow & Green, but it is definitely less consistent than its immediate predecessor, and possibly even Yellow & Green too. Gold & Grey has a good few tracks that hit the compositional highs that would help them fit in right at home in style and substance on Purple, the cathartic and expressive “Seasons” being one of them, along with the soaring “Throw Me an Anchor” and the heartbroken “I’m Already Gone”. The triumphant alternative rocking “Tourniquet” even feels like it could fit in with the high points on Yellow & Green. But there are also plenty of tracks like “Front Toward Enemy”, “Broken Halo”, and the low-key closing track, “Pale Sun” that feel more in line with the more average material on Yellow & Green.

The band also try their hand at a handful of more candid clean/acoustic ballads in the middle of the album, starting with the lighter-waving woes of “I’d Do Anything”, moving on to the soft and subtly bell-tinged “Emmett - Radiating Light”, and finishing gloriously with the tenderly gorgeous vocal harmonies between Baizley and Gina Gleason of “Cold-Blooded Angels”.

Though I don’t want to overstate it, this album does come with one other major flaw besides the production. At just over the hour mark with 18 tracks, Gold & Grey is stretched out to its fuller length partly by its littering with numerous and interlude and prelude tracks of questionable value that often seem to stem from incomplete ideas that made it on here only to pad the album and potentially artificially give it a feeling of being more dynamic and diverse than it really is. Again, none of these tracks are absolute bombs; at worst they feel like inert time wasters, but more often they feel like little unfinished musical doodles or like they’re really just part of the tracks they follow or precede.

But honestly, the more I listen to it, the more Gold & Grey’s positive qualities outshine its negatives. The interlude tracks are mostly inoffensive or even just codas or intros, and the production, though grainy and less than ideal for Baroness’ intricate heavy prog rockery, is not as crippling as many, myself included, had anticipated it being. It takes a few listens to get used to (or past), but it’s not as abrasively lo-fi as a Microphones or Neutral Milk Hotel record or anything like that. Though maybe not as wildly dynamic as the band would like you to believe, this is definitely a diverse crop of songs, most of which find the band playing to the strengths they established on Purple or even succeeding with the few first-time accomplishments they set out for on here. Baroness’ knack for bold, slightly sludgy, proggy, alternative metal composition is thankfully still the focal point of the album, and the band members’ powerful performances still manage to break through the muffling screen of the album’s mixing. I wouldn’t say that it supplants Purple from my favorite spot in their discography, but considering how incredible that album is, it might just never happen. regardless, Gold & Grey is a respectable follow-up and affirmation that Baroness still have plenty of artistic potential and creativity to pull from. It feels weird knowing that this is the end to the color-themed albums, but I’m also excited for what Baroness have in store for the future after the possibilities this album has opened up.

sun-bleached art nouveau/10