Year Of Metal #108: Baroness - Purple
As we land on the final album of this project, how apropos that Baroness manage to bring a bit of everything to the table. I came to Baroness initially searching for great big sludgy stuff. They’re capable of providing that, but they’ll nimbly leap around proggy guitar parts and moments of anthemic near-glam metal. I’ve heard one release of theirs before, 2012’s Yellow & Green. It’s a cliche when talking about double albums, but this 75 minute affair is a peachy single record in bad need of an edit.
I approached 2015’s Purple (all of their albums are colour coded - a classy touch, IMO!) with slightly reduced expectations. I don’t know if this helped, necessarily, or if it’s just the fact that this LP is a far tighter affair, but I enjoyed this a great deal. The worst thing you could say about it is that it’s at times a little bit too anthemic for me, on the likes of “If I Have To Wake Up (Would You Stop The Rain?)”, but I suspect I’m an outlier in these reservations; I think I’m so sensitive to anything remotely Imagine Dragons-y at this point that even this tasteful bit of pomp sets me on edge a little.
For the most part, Baroness get the balance exactly right between darkness and light. The Grammy nominated “Shock Me” walks a fine line - it’s incredibly lush and poppy, but those sweet keys are undercut by chugging riffs, and the poppiness is fun rather than dramatic - you’re throwing yourself around in the crowd to this one, rather than using it to soundtrack emotional YouTube vids.
More importantly: boy can Baroness write a chorus. The great big shout of the title on “Shock Me” is the moment of release, but those gritty chords leading up to it gives such a lift. Having such moments of melodic inspiration in their quiver allows them to stretch themselves elsewhere. “Morningstar”, the opener, had me worried for the first minute - it’s proggy, not unpleasantly so, but proggy enough that I probably wouldn’t enjoy another 41 minutes of winding guitars and impenetrable patterns. But then they open up into this great big chorus and you know you’re in safe hands. John Baizley’s voice encapsulates the dichotomy - he’s big, booming, and performative, but he’s got the grit to sell himself as a serious metal man (he also designs the band’s cool, trippy album artwork).
There’s heavier stuff on here too, like the sprawling “Chlorine & Wine”. Interestingly chosen as Purple’s first single, this one’s melodic but particularly choppy, perhaps the most pure-prog cut on the album. This record was the band’s first after a pretty terrifying sounding bus crash (in Bath of all places); while they don’t seem super confessional lyrically, this track speaks of hospitalisation and tough recovery, so I wonder if that’s why it was chosen as the comeback single. In any event, it showcases everything the band can do, from delicately crafted instrumentation to whopping choruses and bold structural choices.
I’m perhaps keener still on this album when Baroness keep things simpler. “The Iron Bell” is a standout as much for what it doesn’t do as what it does. They’re not shifting things up or tying themselves in knots on their instruments - this is just a straight ahead rocker with plenty of drive and slap. There’s still a rich, harmonised chorus and a fiddly, soaring solo because that’s the kind of mood they were in on this LP, but the show of relative restraint gives the track real energy.
After finding myself a little worn out by Yellow & Green, this polished collection was just what I needed to get back on board with Baroness. I’m inclined to try their earliest work, which seems most likely to hit my sludgy sweet spot, because a tip into even proggier realms might be an issue for me, but they’ve more than demonstrated their ability to mix it up. Of course even this level of pop-metal is enough to piss off some of the purists you’ll find on Reddit etc, but if you’re not annoying those weirdos, you’re probably doing something wrong.
