Baroness- Red Album*

If you like Mastodon or Pelican, you will probably like Southern metal band Baroness, particularly their newest effort, Red Album.

In case that isn't enough of a description of the band for you, here goes: take raw-ass vocals a-la Gojira or Mastodon's more subdued moments, amp up the country-style chicken-pickin' and dueling Skynyrd riffs, and sprinkle liberally with proggy chord progressions and song structures.

The production is tight, and the band are all bitchin' musicians. It's nice to hear a metal band where the bass player is not only audible, but actually contributing something worthwhile instead of just pounding root notes the whole time. Drummer Allan Bickle is more than capable of carrying the weight of a song, evidenced particularly on "Teeth of a Cogwheel," but as with most metal, the guitars are front and center (or more accurately, hard left and right).

My only real complaint with this record, if it can be called a complaint at all, is that at times Baroness veer a little too close to the established sounds of Mastodon or Pelican (much like math-rockers Russian Circles sometimes evoke their forefathers in Don Caballero to a ridiculous extent), but fans of either band will probably find this as a selling point rather than a turnoff. To be fair, there ARE key differences. Baroness are more overtly melodic (the gorgeous instrumental "Cockroach Un Fleur" owes more to Roy Buchanan than Black Sabbath) and, well, Southern-sounding (listen to those string-bends!) than Mastodon ever have, and they're significantly heavier-sounding than Pelican, particularly Pelican's more recent (and well-known) work.

Overall, Baroness have put forward a strong effort and produced one of the best metal albums I've heard so far this year. They've taken unpretentious technical skill and a strong songwriting sensitivity and forged a record without a dud to be found anywhere on it. I'm happy to recommend Red Album.