Review Summary: Board up the house! Hide your boys and girls!
Yellow and Green turns 10 years old in less than 3 months.
Huh. Just like that. Time passes, folks! That full decade of hindsight has at least done its bit to clarify this album's status within Baroness' discography— as their first true departure from bellowing melodic sludge into more spacey, inward-looking territory, the moment that confirmed John Dyer Baizley and co. would not be contenting themselves with the small niche they had carved out with their first two records. In many ways, it is very much your archetypical double album, the kind of we're-more-than-just-metal swing for the fence destined to divide fans. Some longtime listeners bristled or even jumped ship entirely; I'm sure they had their reasons for doing so but I'm not here to humor those reasons today. I'm here to celebrate a messy, indulgent, and downright brilliant album that over the last 10 years has come to mean more to me than any other piece of music.
First of all,
Yellow is a concept album. Okay, wait, backing up a little:
Yellow and Green is two albums rolled into one, conjoined twins with two brains but one shared heart. It is two CDs, or two vinyl records, or two sets of 9 tracks both beginning with a color-coded instrumental theme.
Yellow is the first of these, if you're inclined to listen chronologically, and on top of being the more direct and rock-oriented out of the two it also tells a clear story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Baizley has gone on record to say that none of Baroness' albums are concept albums; he's probably being honest but he's also wrong.
Yellow delivers as much thematic cohesion and structural forethought as
The Wall or
American Idiot or any other rock opera you care to name. If you want to read a tangible narrative throughline here, it isn't at all hard to do so.
Yellow follows the story of two unnamed addicts, opening in the throes of a fruitless struggle for sobriety. On "Take My Bones Away", the narrator desperately clings to an anchor just as unstable as he is. Baizley howls "You lead the way, I'll follow" with a conviction that's being audibly corroded by hopelessness. "Take my bones away / I'll find them every day", he sings— Please try to stop me, even though I can't be stopped. The rhythm section seems to creak under the weight of that stomping main riff. There is too much momentum, and it can only end in disaster.
Sure enough, disaster is exactly what happens on "March to the Sea": The narrator's partner drowns themself in the ocean, with opiate abuse clearly implied to be a motivating factor. The particulars are somewhat vague— was it a premeditated suicide? An accidental overdose? It ultimately makes little difference, however, as the symbolism is what shines through brightest: The ocean as an unknowable, all-consuming maelstrom, heroin as the Icarus' wings ferrying foolhardy mortals to an early grave. Despite being the album's most anthemic, radio-ready moment, it is shockingly bleak. When Baizley's narrator cries out for answers, it isn't to God or the universe, it's to the very drugs that have left him alone and unmoored ("heroin, where did you take my friend / tell me why those ropes are hanging high"). Still, with nothing left to lose, the only place to go is up… right?
The next several tracks outline snapshots of a bumpy recovery. "Little Things" is the first withdrawals, all piteous self-loathing and bitter finger-pointing, culminating in an utterly thunderous wrecking ball of an outro. "Twinkler" rides ghostly acoustic fingerpicking through the eye of the storm, finding a fleeting middle ground between acceptance and resolve. By the end of the song you can already sense that relative peace starting to slip through the narrator's fingers, and sure enough, the brittle backbeat of "Cocainium" skitters across his newly-sober life: a banal, mechanical tedium, underpinned by the dull ache of housebroken addiction. Wake up, take your methadone, feed the dogs, and wait it out. Keep it up and one day you'll stop wishing for death. Maybe. If I'm making this sound a bit like misery porn, well, that's really only half the story; the music itself is, more often than not, devastatingly beautiful. This stretch of the album in particular doubles as a showcase for John Congleton's astounding production work, from the wisps of hazy ambience surrounding "Twinkler" to the sickly bass tone that helps give "Little Things" so much tension. Here, Baroness managed the impressive feat of crafting a sonic palette that supports the grim subject matter, but never gets hard to actually listen to. The darkness is pervasive without suffocating the listener.
…that is, until we reach
Yellow's closing run. "Back Where I Belong" skulks into a full-on relapse, building a sense of inescapable dread from the solo through a triumphant middle-8 all the way to a blissful, impressionistic outro. That the band parcels out the heart-swelling major melodies that have been so thin on the ground for the last few tracks can only ring as ominous. This is a false high, and the crash is going to be catastrophic. It all comes to a head on "Sea Lungs". Reeling from the guilt of falling off the wagon and the comedown from his first high in ages, the narrator jumps into the sea, just as his friend did before him. "You lead the way, I'll follow," one last time. The lyrics take the form of a conversation between our protagonist and the mighty ocean itself. In his final moments, he hears it tell him to surrender: "Breathe in deep, let the sea fill your lungs / better to brace for death than die for a promised land."
Here's a question: should he?
Should he surrender to death? Fuck me, you'd think it would be an easy "no", but after all that's preceded it, how can I say I don't at least see both sides? How can such a shattered, painful life continue on? "Eula" shies away from a firm answer here, yet it simultaneously underlines the themes that have been running throughout the album so far.
Yellow is, at its core, about fate. It is about the terrible, crushing inevitability that pulls us from day to day, and about where, one way or another, it will finally lead us. Ending on such a tense beat is, in concept, a ballsy move, and perhaps even a fundamentally unsatisfying one. Luckily, there's a whole second disc left to get through here, and it's here where things get both a lot less dense and a lot more complicated.
Green is not a concept album. Sure, it follows through on many of
Yellow's thematic and aesthetic concerns, but in the years I've spent listening to it I've never gleaned much in the way of a narrative structure, or even a particularly consistent lyrical voice. It is where Baroness allow themselves to wander, revisiting and contemplating the sonic worlds they are creating. On the whole, there is probably less to be said about these songs, but make no mistake, they hold up just as well as individual compositions, and are no less crucial to understanding
Yellow & Green.
The back half of a double album is a crucial place to ensure a listener’s interest isn’t waning, so in addition to a handful of wavier cuts,
Green delivers some of Baroness’s most strident rockers to date. “Board Up The House” marries a bludgeoning midtempo stomp with a bittersweet melody that recalls the grunge greats of the 90s, “Psalms Alive” shatters its twitchy first two minutes with a galloping southern-fried-NWOBHM finale, and the triumphant “The Line Between” closes the doors on the album with a roar. Even “Green Theme” balances its austere melancholy with a heaping helping of crunchy guitar heroics. As beautiful and harrowing as ghostly prog/psych excursions like “Foolsong” and “Stretchmarker” are, a full LP of like-minded material could have been less rewarding and more cumbersome after
Yellow’s full 39 minutes. As it stands, the harder stuff carries the energy and tension of
Yellow, while the mellow somber ballads fold in a welcome variety and tonal depth that finds new shades and details in Baroness’s musicianship and storytelling.
Green’s most interesting function, however, is as an array of roundabout answers to the central questions raised by
Yellow: How can we construct a meaningful existence in the face of our own suffering? What alchemy makes it possible to fight for a future where everything we love crumbles and fades, while our pain lives on indefinitely? Some songs on
Green succumb to the pressure— “Mtns. (The Crown & Anchor)” and “Collapse” both traffic in the same drug-addled imagery and hopeless demeanor of
Yellow’s latter half. “Collapse” in particular sees that hopelessness curdling into something decidedly uglier, decrying humanity as “soured milk” and “rotten fruit”. Nihilism may be a response to the weight of the world, but it's far from the only one. “Psalms Alive” finds purpose and strength in a cause greater than oneself, comforted by the promise of an honorable death, while “The Line Between” exalts a joyous hedonism, a call to savor both the highs and lows of life while we have the chance to do so. The tranquil “If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry” and the surging “Green Theme” are, as instrumentals, not so explicit in offering a way to cope with hardship, but nonetheless carry themselves distinctly as resolutions- one way or another, by the end of each, you are at the proverbial End, and each lets you use what it’s left you with however you see fit. Hell, maybe sometimes all you need to get yourself out of bed is a nice song.
These songs collectively cast a wide net, and different people will find their own satisfaction in different bits and pieces of
Green— by design, it’s a patchwork. But for me, it always comes back to “Board Up The House”. Maybe it doesn’t take the hundreds of listens I’ve given this song to appreciate what a rich, nuanced tapestry of moods and ideas it creates, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s the epitome of saying a lot with a little- in only two short verses and a two-line chorus, I vividly hear nostalgia, regret, worry, love, fear, denial and paranoia, all tied up with one notion: family. It’s about wanting to protect your children from the horrors of the world, but on a deeper level it is about clinging to those close to you because, at the end of the day, there is nothing else to cling to.
All we have against the fray is one another. That is what I believe, perhaps more deeply than anything else, and that’s what I hear in the bloodied, weathered tenacity of “Board up the House”.
Yellow & Green, taken as a whole, is not an album about solving addiction or tragedy or trauma. It’s an album about coping with those things, accepting their places in the fabric of your life and finding a way to still sleep at night and maybe even crack a smile every so often. Everyone copes, or doesn’t, differently, and of Baroness’s myriad achievements here, perhaps their greatest is holding none in higher regard than any other. One way or another, through storm and stress, tomorrow we’ll be gone. Before the darkness comes, feel the light of day.
