RED ALBUM

The Red Album is an outstanding yet lacking debut album by Baroness. In this album we can listen to a wide variety of styles including prog metal, sludge metal, post metal and more. As usual I'm not a big fan of sludge metal bands, especially bands with a harsh sounding vocalist, but I must say that this album stand's out from the rest. Baroness can easily be compared to Mastodon but with something's done a bit differently.

The thing that caught most of my attention was how energetic the songs in this album are. I would have to say that instruments are played in such a good manner that it makes me ignore totally these harshly annoying vocals. The rhythms have odd time signatures and can change instantly from something melodic to something heavy and explosive.

The first song: Rays of Opinion is a good introductory song but it would have been better if it was a little bit shorter and the intro of the song is long and repetitive. Wailing Wintry Wind has a very atmospheric intro and the part that follows sounds very similar to Mastodon, and the ending has a sort of melodic ending which gets sort of ruined by the vocals. The song Aleph has a very similar sound to Wailing Wintry Wind but luckily the singer doesn't play his part here: just two screams barely. I sort of noticed that most the songs after the first four are simply instrumental with very few vocal lines and are very short. Other standout tracks include Teeth of a Cogwheel and Wanderlust which has some intensive melodies. I really couldn't think of the best track in this album cause in my opinion there wasn't really one that stood out of the rest. And as for the hidden track, it's not even worth it waiting almost 11 minutes for an extremely short song with nothing quite good.

In overall this album is a good prog/sludge/post-metal with talented musicians. Nothing outstanding but it seems interesting enough to give it a few spins every now and then and if you like Mastodon you should really consider this one.

A 3.2! for me!