When they started making burly, progressive sludge almost 10 years ago, Baroness weren't teenagers: They were grown men with a refined, nuanced approach to heavy metal. Even in 2003, it wasn't your typical Southern sludge swamp. That said, I doubt anyone listening then could've predicted Yellow & Green. The quartet's new 18-song, 75-minute double album offers a broad, rich expanse of pretty, psychedelic, occasionally heavy, mostly straight-up rock that veers easily into pop, post-rock, and lulling ambient washes. There are a number of new elements to Baroness in 2012-- frontman John Baizley is the father of a young daughter and lives in Philadelphia instead of Savannah; after the recording of Yellow & Green, Matt Maggioni came on board as the group's new bassist (which means longtime member Summer Welch is no more). The sound itself is the biggest shift, though it shouldn't come as a total surprise. They've hinted at these new avenues, and even tentatively explored a few, on their first two LPs, Blue Record and Red Album. What's surprising here is how well it all works.
There's almost always some filler on a record of this length-- it's a casualty of double albums-- but there's an impressive scarcity of it here. Even the songs that float by more humbly, or as background music, ultimately have a place in the overall dynamic by the first or second listen. And they are all songs. Take the "themes" that open Yellow and Green, respectively, the warm, aqueous two minutes of "Yellow Theme", the more drifting, airy, chilly (and post-rock anthemic) four-and-a-half minutes of "Green Theme". These are beautiful instrumentals, compositions with actual force and not more incidentals.
I recently interviewed Baizley about the record. He detailed how the group's idea of heaviness shifted from their early days to the present. He explained that "tricks" like "10 amplifiers on stage, a ton of volume, and notes on [a] guitar that were more appropriate for bass guitar" were a kind of "artifice to mask youthful songwriting." In the present, the group is more focused on subtlety: "Now that songs have become more important to us, we're trying to find the more nuanced, more appropriate-for-us idea of heavy." Yellow & Green showcases this new take in spades. As Baizley put it, "the Baroness-circa-2012 definition of heavy [is] not a tuning and it's not necessarily a volume; it's more of a feeling or an idea or some goal post that we're headed towards." And, practically speaking, the cleaner singing is a kind of survival tactic: His and backup vocalist Pete Adams' vocal cords couldn't continue along the raw, shouting path they'd set for themselves earlier on.