RED ALBUM

Baroness' debut album offers a straight-ahead mashup of accessible traditional metal fused at the hip with progressive sludge metal of the Mastodon school. It's a solid point of entry for their work, though at the same time precisely because it's so easy on the ear and accessible it may be a disappointment to listeners coming to it after hearing Baroness' more progressive and experimental work. The material here represents creative territory which the band itself eventually moved on from, and I suspect most listeners will move on from it too, but as a gateway drug to wilder material in sludge metal territory it has its merits.