YELLOW & GREEN

"New musical direction" is perhaps the scariest combination of three words to fans of any band, but for my part Baroness' three year metamorphosis after the competent sludgefest Blue Record is a convincing and worthwhile experiment, though as time goes by it feels increasingly like it's suffering from the old disease of double albums - namely, that there's enough really compelling ideas here for a super-intense single album spread out thinly over two discs.

Sonically, it's strange amalgam of stoner metal and the heaviest end of psychedelia, with a few spacier moments - I detected at points passages reminiscent of an odd mashup of Meddle-era and Animals-era Pink Floyd, and elsewhere a few moments a lot like Popul Vuh - though the album is saved from becoming a nostalgia-fest by taking on musical influences from much more recent subgenres. On the Yellow disc in particular much of this ends up being a particular aesthetic achieved by the tuning, engineering and production - when you strip aside the surface aesthetic there's some pretty standard but fun hard rock songs underpinning all this.

There's a few crescendos here and there which are highly reminiscent of metalcore, some musical passages where I honestly couldn't tell whether I was listening to a guitar riff or an electronic pulse, and overall the album offers a dizzying combination of musical genres. When it works, it works pretty well - at other times, it feels like they're throwing lots of ideas at the wall and seeing which ones stick.