With the popularity of Mastodon, Yakuza, this year's Danava among others, record labels clearly want to promote more bands that play dirty metal/hardcore rooted music but take it to another level with influences from various other genres. Georgia's Baroness releasing their latest album on Relapse just sealed the deal for me.

Baroness is led by John Baizley who plays guitars, handles the vocals and gets the credit for the brilliant album artwork too (see above). Allen Blickle on drums, Brian Blickle on guitars and Summer Welch on bass complete their lineup on this album. John says there's a concept behind the name of the band which he doesn't want to reveal to the audience. Baroness also doesn't give any special names to their albums. The first album is called One, the second one Two and followed that by a really good split with Unpersons earlier this year, and now this is their third album titled The Red Album. I know, as straightforward as a Russian named Ivan, a French named Pierre, a Korean named Kim, Mexican named Chico or even a Nepali named Bahadur.

It's difficult to come up with a straight forward description of what this album sounds like. A parallel can be drawn to the metal-hardcore-sludge influenced bands that play progressive/experimental music (Neurosis, Pelican and the whole ilk) but not just that. Another parallel can be drawn to what Mastodon is doing with the similar styles of influences too. There are similarities during the more ferocious riffing parts of this music and the vocal stylings.

The Red Album isn't as sludgy as they were prior to this album. They've toned the fury down a wee bit, have written more accessible and catchy melodies but with the song structures that's more downright prog and epic than before. They mix that up with things like trippy spacey passages that build up to something heavy and even sweet guitar harmonies thrown in.

This is still going to be a difficult album for mainstream appeal but hell, if the bands mentioned at the beginning of the review are getting some attention, these guys just might too. This might just become the era of new prog soon. But let's not bother about all that shit, just get this album.

Label: Relapse
Year of Release: 2007