Baroness - Your Baroness Tour
Cambridge, MA
16 April 2022
For their first tour following the Covid-19 pandemic, rock and metal stalwarts Baroness elected to take their web address and Instagram handle quite literally: “Your Baroness”. They opened up polls for people to select what songs they’d like to hear, not just crafting one setlist for the tour from the voting, but making a bespoke set for each individual stop. The Your Baroness tour concluded just outside of Boston one rainy Saturday evening, a sold-out gig of course, people packed in to see the performance many of them helped curate. Baroness have released five LPs in the grand tradition of albums named by color, each featuring gorgeous album art by frontman John Dyer Baizley that prominently displays the eponymous hues.
For Boston’s part, the setlist leans equally towards 2009’s Blue, 2012’s Yellow & Green, and their most recent studio effort Gold & Grey. The latter is the first Baroness record to feature Gina Gleason on guitar and backing vocals, and her entry into the band coincided with even more focus on gorgeous vocal harmonies between her and Baizley on this latest disc. Baroness are often termed as metal, but there’s plenty to love in their music even for those who travel in the rock spheres, be it heavy prog-rock like Porcupine Tree or even the meaty riffs one often hears in post-hardcore. The genre distinction has mattered less and their sonic palette has grown ever-wider over the band’s existence, and even the very first song on Gold & Grey, ‘Front Toward Enemy’, showcases that huge range: a distorted bass groove from Nick Jost; hugely technical drum fills by Sebastian Thomson; and a gorgeous, choir-like vocal section in the bridge.
There’s an immense amount of technical skill in the band, the three guitarists in front each possessing a huge pedal board, and the wiry Thomson behind them capable of ascending to truly wild speeds. But if there’s one thing that comes across in equal measure to, or perhaps even exceeding, their instrumental prowess, it’s the joy the band gets playing together. All four members bare big, toothy grins during and between songs, none more than Baizley’s wide- and wild-eyed smile, and they play together like some huge machine greater even than the sum of its parts. The ways in which Baroness directly engage with metal hearken back to the more classic standards of the genre: Baizley’s huge voice bellows, evoking imagery on a cosmic scale, influenced by assorted mythologies, guitars soar and crescendo like they’re trying to sonically imitate the myriad jagged angles of a lightning bolt. This is the good stuff, the metal that makes you think about dead gods; classic, but also not afraid to augment itself with Jost’s array of synths, or acoustic guitars, or even a xylophone (though that last one does not make it to the live stage). Baizley and Gleason both take up acoustic guitars in the middle of the evening for the duo of ‘Cold-Blooded Angels’ and ‘I’d Do Anything’, the latter one of the most purely emotive Baroness songs ever. “I’d do anything to feel like I’m alive again,” he cries out, filling the room, the yearning in his voice palpable.
The beauty of the Your Baroness tour, in the end, is that it effortlessly allows the band to make the case that they are at the pinnacle not only of metal music, but of guitar music in a more general sense as well. They can – and basically have – employed every category of instrument in their writing, written songs quiet and loud, thrashing and calm, epic and understated. From the chugging, guttural ‘Isak’; to the shredding on mid-period ‘Sea Lungs’, to the sheer variety of anything off Gold & Grey, their set ultimately comes to be a wondrous tour of all the different colors they’ve ever employed. And to close the night, the band returns to the stage after a short encore break despite having already played for more than two and a half hours. They bring everything full-circle with a performance from First, fittingly their inaugural release from nearly twenty years ago. They opt for ‘Tower Falls’, itself the opening track, and close the night with its uncharacteristically scratchy vocal and huge riff that fades out into space with a towering wall of guitars. Even back in 2004 the instrumental skill was already there, and though he is the only remaining member of the original Baroness lineup, the years have only found Baizley growing ever more creative as a writer and collaborator. Whatever shade Baroness takes next, it’ll be the pleasure of the listener to call it Ours.
Showcasing art from some of my favourite artists in the field of visual arts, including pop culture - alternative movie posters, books and comics; imaginative realism; fantastical; new contemporary; pop surrealism; conceptual and illustration.
