All of Your Fears Are Well Founded and True

Baroness are from the states, they’re southerners and they make this badass mix of southern rock and bruising volume with a healthy dose of chug-chug-chugging guitars. Apparently this is progressive sludge metal. Ignore the label, it’s really groove laden and if I was to describe it I would call it heavy, heavy (really fucking heavy) rock.

Blue Record has two great claims to fame:

1. It has one of the greatest ever song titles – “A Horse Called Golgotha”

2. It has one of the most high-octane, fist-pummelling, horse-hoof-pounding tracks of the year – “The Gnashing”. Admittedly this is a rubbish title, but I challenge anyone to listen to this and not get some sort of kick out of the way it builds and builds before unleashing two verses of shouted lyrics in a storm of full tilt guitars and crashing drums.

Actually, I’ve decided I really like Baroness. I like their heavy, loud, groove laden onslaught. Plus, the instrumental interludes on Blue Record, where melodic riffs are teased out for a minute or two, give you little breathers between the heavier songs. What can I say, It’s my first taste of metal and I’m surprised that it rocks so hard, that it’s so much fun and that I like it so much.

“All of your fears are well founded and true, all my hands are callous and cruel, all of my arrows that riddle you through are bullets that fire me back into you.” – The Gnashing (Baroness)

Myspace – Official – Last.fm

Into the deep black of the night…

Ages ago, I wrote about Mastodon and their third album, Blood Mountain. I said that I would never like it and that I didn’t think I would ever understand metal’s appeal. Well, it’s time to eat my hat. But only half of it. For although I still have no clue about the sprawling genre that is “metal”, I’ve had a complete volt-face on Mastodon I’m really enjoying their latest album Crack the Skye.

In fact Crack the Skye has acted a bit like a gateway drug. As soon as I devoured it I listened to their watershed album Leviathan, and then I moved onto Blood Mountain. And now I’m looking for more, or maybe something similar…

The problem is that I still have no clue when it comes to listening to metal, but I think the time has finally come to explore the strangest of all musical genres.

Now, I don’t have a plan of any kind, I’m just going off the deep end. But I do want to come out of this knowing my progressive from my power, my black from my death, and my stoner from my sludge.

So, irregular Shoveling Snow service will continue as normal, just expect to be kept abreast of my voyage into the deep black of the night…

‘Capability’ Brown

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was an English landscape gardener who lived in the mid-Georgian period and was notorious for creating fake wilderness’ by moving hills, damming rivers and flooding small valleys.

He earned his nickname ‘Capability’ because he would tell his clients that their estates had great “capability” for landscape improvement. Generally this improvement would involve ripping out old formal gardens and replacing them with smooth, bland acres of undulating grass and serpentine lakes.

In fact Brown was so fond of landscape improvement that Richard Owen Cambridge once quipped that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could “see heaven before it was improved.”