#5 Album of the Year
- Story by Kevin Stewart-Panko
Baroness - The Red Album (Relapse)
A word to the metal scene’s wise: Don’t mess with John Baizley’s mother. Like most parents of extreme music-obsessed kids, she wasn’t always supportive of her son’s chosen path. However, considering Baroness’ recent strides and success, Mrs. B. counts herself as the band’s biggest fan and supporter. She even lurks on message boards (!), reading comments regarding her son’s band.
“The other day my mom was like, ‘A little gentleman wrote he didn’t like your album because the label made you soften your sound. Did the label make you soften up?’” Baizley relays, understandably laughing. “I had to tell her, ‘No mom, the label didn’t make us soften up.’”
Well, if Mrs. Baizley is reading—and considering the reported scolding her progeny received for off-color language in Baroness’ October 2005 Upfront feature, we can only assume she is—she should be flushed with pride about The Red Album nabbing the #5 spot in our Best of 2007 poll. Although, considering the circumstances under which the album was created, fans with and without the Baizley surname should be glad it turned out as brilliantly as it did.
“The album was written in blocks from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in 100-degree heat every day,” explains Baizley. “We wrote it in the basement of the local punk club. It’s one of the only basements in Savannah because the entire town, except for that one street, is below sea-level and because the city is so crime-ridden, having a warehouse space is essentially putting crosshairs on your gear. It was this dingy, dank, hot basement downtown, right across the street from a restaurant owned by [celebrity southern chef] Paula Deen. It was the height of tourist season and every day we’d show up tourists were lined up around the block. Here we are, trying to get into a creative mindset at 11 a.m. surrounded by fanny packs and Hawaiian shirts. In the back of your mind you’re definitely thinking, ‘I hope we’re not bumming out these people waiting to eat fried chicken and green beans.’”
The Red Album provides the proverbial chicken grease with “Grad”; you can feel the oppressive heat and humidity in “Isak” and “The Birthing” echoes the darkness of Savannah’s mean streets. And even though Baroness are planning easier writing arrangements in the future, these circumstances affected the album positively.
“Totally!” Baizley concurs. “You’re in a different head space in the morning and early afternoon. Most obviously, there’s very little drinking happening. If you walk into a bar at 11 in the morning, it’s not appealing; you’re not thinking, ‘Can I get a beer?’ And since there was a cap on when we had to leave, we really had to focus and use our time. I think all that colored the tone of the record differently than if we had written it at night.”
