Baroness - Purple

Baroness have had a rough couple of years.  While on tour to support their phenomenal Yellow & Green, their bus crashed catastrophically in England.  The wreck caused serious injuries to the band and their crew, forcing two long-time band members, Allen Blickle (drums) and Matt Maggioni (bass), to retire from music completely.  John Baizley, primary songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist, was forced to undergo months of intense physical therapy after having his arm so thoroughly crushed that doctors considered amputation.  It's tough for a group to come back from any hardship, but lineup changes are especially complicated.  A band has to carefully integrate new members with new perspectives and styles into an already established sound, maintaining their original identity while allowing for growth and evolution.  It's almost certainly more difficult to do all of that while trying to re-learn how to make your fingers work, let alone fly around a fretboard. Baroness handled this better than anyone could have expected.  Baizley made a full recovery and the band recorded and released some of their strongest work a mere three years after the devastating crash that left them without a rhythm section.  Incredibly, Purple sounds like it picks up right where Yellow & Green left off.  Another natural step in the band's progression.  Production-wise, the album continues the move toward a cleaner, crisper quality.  If there is break in their sound trajectory, it's that Purple actually takes a turn for the heavier.  As they've mellowed over time, relatively speaking, they've stepped back from their thick, slow-moving-beast origins in sludge metal and into a tighter form of heavy, riff-driven classic rock.  It's not a bad move for an aging band, as it has given Baizley an opportunity to use his gruff, hyper-masculine voice to convey more than just anger (here's looking at you, Hetfield), and likely add a few years (or decades) to its longevity (here's looking at you, Grohl).  However, where their last album slipped into mellow bits of pastoral thoughtfulness, this album powers straight ahead.  When the album does tone it down, it gives the band an opportunity flex some atmospheric muscle and deliver a groove-focused instrumental that sounds like a solitary walk through a 70s noir.  True to form, though, as soon as they catch their breath, they quickly punch you right in the mouth. Song-for-song, this might be Baroness's best work.  The drums thunder, the basslines drive, the guitarwork is as complex and tasteful as ever, and the melodies are the catchiest of their career.  As cliched as it might sound, this album actually is a triumph.  After all they went through, Baroness didn't just come back.  They moved forward.