First / Second Reissue

Album review

This six-track release reissues and combines the First and Second EPs (yes, that's what they were called) produced by Baroness for the Hyperrealist label in 2004 and 2005 -- surely as a result of the widespread critical praise deservedly heaped upon their subsequent 2007 full-length debut through Relapse, The Red Album. And tempting as it is for critics to reappraise and upgrade any quality band's earliest music based on their latter-day achievements, the fact is that Baroness' general sonic imprint was already surprisingly fully shaped, even at this formative stage of the group's existence. Granted, that imprint was copped extensively from Mastodon's visionary efforts at downsizing post-metal's multi-dimensional experimentation into more manageable, focused song nuggets, which were then streaked with disparate ingredients of sludge, death metal, and alternative rock. But it's one thing for a band to simply copy ideas, and another entirely when said band possesses enough talent to spin fresh and memorable tunes of their own out of the bare essentials. And this is what Baroness achieve here via particularly inventive and infectious tracks like "Tower Falls," "Rise," "Red Sky," and "Vision," which, tellingly, often excel during their softer passages, and in some ways anticipate Mastodon's own evolution into less extreme domains via 2006's Blood Mountain -- so who influenced who, after all? Needless to say, worrying about such questions is rarely worth the time invested, so suffice to say that Baroness' career-launching EPs were well-worth reissuing for serious fans eager to hear more from the promising group.

© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo