3 out of 5

Label: Abraxan Hymns

Produced by: Baroness, Dave Fridmann

Continuing their trajectory of sonic expansion, personnel changes, and two-album runs with notable producers, Baroness return with Gold & Grey, a testy piece of work that has some great ideas and a puzzling way of presenting those ideas.

While the album title was a last minute change, and thus not seemingly as synced with the material as the purposefully divided Yellow & Green, there is something of a hard shift in the middle of G&G, which finds the group pursuing an arguably more artsy-fartsy side of things that calls to mind Cave In’s Jupiter / Antenna stylings, if not so much musical in accessibility, then in a “we’re space rock now” kind of fashion. I respect but get annoyed with Jupiter, and kind of dig Antenna more over all, but either way, I don’t mean for that to be a direct dig: I’m all for the way Baroness has branched out from swamp rock and into metal-adjacent territories over the years, and the krautrock and funk and psychedelic touches found in the album’s back half are not uninteresting or without value.

They are… random, though. If we want to go ahead and divvy up the album by its colors, the Gold half is gold: it rocks; I’ll stan for Dave Fridmann’s contentious mix and the way the group leaned in to Dave’s Flaming Lips stylings; and it gives us the Baroness we “want” alongside some truly engaging sidesteps and explorations – in noise, in ambience, in psych. But then Grey is grey: it’s full of short instrumentals which feel like extras and not transitional or additive tracks; it’s sequenced to completely undermine the rockers, and the rockers it delivers are good, but rehash bits done in the Gold half, or at least that’s how it feels when surrounded by the less-involving material. I can thus imagine a stripped down version of this album that ditches most of the instrumentals and keeps us much more engaged throughout – though I’m sure people would still fight over Fridmann’s mix.

The argument there is over how blown out the low end can be, with the drums clipping, and making it harder to pick out the guitar. I’ve seen a couple reviews that indirectly suggest this was Dave’s “fault,” like the band didn’t want it that way, but… come on. They stuck with Fridmann for a reason, and this came out on Baroness’ own label; I feel fairly confident that John Dyer Baizley and crew were well capable of saying otherwise if they didn’t want this to sound like Lips’ Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi. And I guess I don’t hear it as clipping, because it’s more careful than that: there are dimensions to the mix where the bass gets sharp and the drums blow up, but there are equally loud sounds that ring through. I completely get folks not digging that, when the Baroness sound is otherwise pretty clean, but treating it like it was undesired seems wrong. I also think it was done in the spirit of trying to bring all of the different sounds across the album together, kind of pushing away the standard Baroness song style and blurring its edges so it was okay to go even more experimental. On what I’ve considered the “Gold” side above, that really works; but after “Throw Me An Anchor,” the plan falls apart due to the sequencing, recovering once we’re into Borderlands funky coda (which is honestly kind of left-field, but it’s fun), and excellent closer Pale Sun… though that would also have a lot more power without the general extra clutter several of the tracks preceding it.

Gold & Grey was a good experiment. And probably necessary, to kind of get to the bloat stage of the Baroness sound, which I’d note they pursued in a much more interesting way than most long-running bands, and kind of only stymied by a very uneven execution, even if the experiment itself – stretching metal into other genres – was, I think successful.