Music
[Album Review] Baroness ‘Yellow & Green’
Hailing from Savannah, Georgia, Baroness is a four-piece group that plays a mixture of sludge and melodic metal with traces of prog and a sprinkle of punk. With elements of these genres, you KNOW that I was intrigued to listen to their latest offering. After all, they’ve toured with Metallica, Opeth, Clutch, Mastodon, and many more influential, fantastic artists. Add to this the fact that both Red and Blue are fascinating, incredible albums, and I was all set to sit back and delve into the two-disc set that is Yellow & Green. So, was I satisfied or left wanting?
Opening with “Yellow Theme”, the album begins deceptively soft and gentle before entering the filthy, riff-tastic “Take My Bones Away”. However, this mellow melodic beauty is a recurring theme for, even through the distortion and intensity, there is a beauty that never leaves. Even through the anger there is still guitar harmonies that are a joy to hear.
Were I asked to use other bands to describe Yellow, I would say it has the alt-rock flavors and acoustic beauty of Anathema mixed with the punk/hardcore metal styles of Wolves Like Us. Considering that I love both of these artists, this should be taken as a compliment of very high magnitude. “Little Things” might well be the track that perfectly exemplifies this half of the album.
The production is gritty, grimy, gnarly and I love it. This album isn’t meant to sound clean. Hell, just take a look at the cover artwork. It’s violent but beautiful, complex yet engaging, erotic yet nonsexual. All of these ideas can easily be used to describe the sound and music of the album.
Meanwhile, Green is, as a whole, much more light and mellow as well as sounding much more raw. It’s almost as though it was a collection of B-sides and studio takes that normally wouldn’t have made the cut but the band decided that adding it on would be for the best. And I’m not complaining. There are some wonderful moments on Green, such as the gorgeous and sunny “Stretchmarker”.
The Final Word: Shifting between heavy and beautiful (and often times mixing the two together), Yellow & Green is a fantastic evolutionary step for Baroness. This album comes highly, highly recommended.
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It’s a new day, and you’ve got new John Carpenter to listen to. John Carpenter, Daniel Davies and Cody Carpenter have released the new track He Walks By Night this morning, the second single off their upcoming album Lost Themes IV: Noir, out May 3 on Sacred Bones Records.
Lost Themes IV: Noir is the latest installment in a series that sees Carpenter releasing new music for John Carpenter movies that don’t actually exist. The first Lost Themes was released in 2015, followed by Lost Themes II in 2016 and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death in 2021.
Sacred Bones previews, “It’s been a decade since John Carpenter recorded the material that would become Lost Themes, his debut album of non-film music and the opening salvo in one of Hollywood’s great second acts. Those vibrant, synth-driven songs, made in collaboration with his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, kickstarted a musical renaissance for the pioneering composer and director. With Lost Themes IV: Noir, they’ve struck gold again, this time mining the rich history of the film noir genre for inspiration.
“Since the first Lost Themes, John has referred to these compositions as “soundtracks for the movies in your mind.” On the fourth installment in the series, those movies are noirs. Like the film genre they were influenced by, what makes these songs “noirish” is sometimes slippery and hard to define, and not merely reducible to a collection of tropes. The scores for the great American noir pictures were largely orchestral, while the Carpenters and Davies work off a sturdy synth-and-guitar backbone.
“The trio’s free-flowing chemistry means Lost Themes IV: Noir runs like a well-oiled machine—the 1951 Jaguar XK120 Roadster from Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps, or the 1958 Plymouth Fury from John’s own Christine. It’s a chemistry that’s helped power one of the most productive stretches of John’s creative life, and Noir proves that it’s nowhere near done yielding brilliant results.”
You can pre-save Lost Themes IV: Noir right now! And listen to the new track below…
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