In over a decade, Baroness has cinched itself up as one of the heavy rock bands that genuinely counts in a broader pop-cultural feel. There has been, of the path, no shortage of terrific heavy and progressive rock music made inside the same timeframe. Still, for this reason, the cultural window has shifted, ted, rendered organizations of this kind primarily outdoor of the considerations that popular such other groups as Mastodon.
Baroness enunciate their legacy as a seminal band, now not unlike the manner the Smashing Pumpkins completely etched themselves into the annals of rock history with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness — and to achieve this with a record as first-rate as Gold & Grey is simply an extra little bit of icing on the cake. A history as long as Gold & Grey (large no longer handiest in phrases of the band and the exceptional of the album itself, however just the sheer girth of the component) needs a reaction masking several related topics. First and most banal:
Yes, retitling this report Orange for your non-public library is miles excellent. Interviews at the time of the discharge of the primary unmarried “Borderlines” and its release have clarified that its working name was as such and (obviously, indeed) influenced the direction of the album artwork. There’s even a bit of “orange” -ness phenomenologically besides, which we’ll address in a second. The name change, for better or for worse, changed into likely intended to sound more like a conventional title than the borderline cliche set of colors they’d been working from earlier. This is an understandable purpose to trade the identity but misses, at a few degrees, that phenomenological “orange” -ness that still pervades this album.
We did now not together bat our eyes on the previous coloration collection: Red Album felt like brewing and stewing liminal sun casting first/very last rays of light, Blue Record felt like a tangled snarl of weeds cloaking catfish all submerged in Georgia swampy marsh, Yellow & Green felt sunny and verdant, and Purple felt you adore it emerged screaming out of a hydrocodone haze. Likewise, Gold & Grey appears like it might fit somewhere between Red Album and Yellow & Green by using the manner of Purple, mirroring the sonic systems of Purple but timbrally sitting somewhere nearer the hang-out of Red Album and the huge-winged and creatively joyous span of songwriting demonstrated on Yellow & Green.
