truest colors
“My favorite disgusting comparison was when we were on tour last summer and my tooth got knocked in. First it turned grey, and I had to get it pulled. Now it’s gonna be gold!”
That’s Baroness’ new lead guitarist, Gina Gleason, on the gnarly physical connection between the title of the progressive hard rock outfit’s fifth full-length release, Gold & Grey, and her tour-damaged maw. Its album cover, illustrated by vocalist-guitarist John Baizley, fittingly surrounds a series of female figures and ginger-feathered birds with clusters of excised molars and grey-plated chisels. If you’ve been with the band since they broke out of Savannah, Georgia, alongside contemporaries Mastodon and Kylesa, you’ll know these kinds of color studies are a recurring theme.
Given Baizley’s background as a painter — in addition to having created all the hypnotic and surrealistic album covers for Baroness, he’s done designs for Metallica, Skeletonwitch and many more — it’s fitting that the group are just as conceptual with modern metal soundscaping as they are about exploring the color wheel. Even their light show bathes the quartet — which includes bassist/keyboardist Nick Jost and drummer Sebastian Thomas — in purposeful shades inspired by their back catalog: 2007’s Red Album, 2009’s Blue Record, 2012’s Yellow and Green and 2015’s Purple.
When Guitar World meets up with the guitarists beneath the stage of Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre, midway through a co-headlining trek with American black metal crew Deaf-heaven, the aesthetics are fittingly as juxtaposed as their latest album title. Though seated together behind a broken maple desk in a pallid beige side room, its walls paint-peeled and pocked with suspiciously fist-sized craters, Gleason and Baizley are vividly reflecting upon the textures and hues of Gold & Grey, a double-sized release that finds Baroness happily splattering the canvas in a more experimental mindframe than their last LP.
You could argue that the pulse-quickening pace of 2015’s especially anthemic was heavily influenced by the band’s frightening brush with death
