Sludge, prog, and post-metal band Baroness played an emotional set at Lodge Room in the Highland Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles on Saturday, September 20th. The night was one of remembrance, playing their first two albums, Red and Blue front to back in the shadow of their original drummer Allen Bickle’s recent passing.
Opening for Baroness on the West Coast leg of the tour is Weedeater, the stoniest, sludge-iest, doomiest cannabis-obsessed band to ever come out of North Carolina (or anywhere else). There’s no limit to the descriptiveness of a great band name, and listening to Weedeater is, in fact, more like the experience of eating weed than smoking it. Just like that moment of realising you’re in way over your head after you ate a handful of gummies, Weedeater is a deafening, overwhelming, and slightly terrifying experience. The fans were more than ready, blowing plumes of smoke into the air as they smashed into each other in the pit.
Baroness is a band even truer to their name, with the power and sophistication of royalty, but also the delicacy and emotional depth of the non-sexualised women on the album artwork hand-painted by lead vocalist, guitarist, and sole remaining original member John Baizley. Less like eating weed and more like the cerebral head high of vaporising, Baroness have always taken time to think amidst the instrumental mayhem.
Even in their first two albums, the tension between metal badassery and quiet reflection was already apparent. The Red and Blue albums both serve up a twisty, mysterious, and never-boring mix of sludge riffs and dual lead guitars. The intricate, mildly creepy riffs recall my own childhood favourite music from Metroid on NES. Baizley is only three years older than me, so perhaps he got hooked on the off-kilter and unnerving notes woven into propulsive, head-nodding grooves the same way I did.
The current Baroness lineup stabilised in 2017, when Gina Gleeson joined as lead guitarist. Shredding on a Telecaster and looking like she’s about to go Super Saiyan between headbangs, she manages to equal the enormous stage presence of Baizley, who is all huge smiles and pogo-jumping while playing Strats and an even more uncommon metal guitar–a Rickenbacker.
Bassist Nick Jost played a unique split-headstock Kramer bass and rocked a shirt with an intimidatingly muscled woman brandishing a baseball bat. On the back, it said, “A Hard Woman Is Good To Find.” Drummer Sebastian Thompson, who pursued a PhD in physics before focusing on music full time, wore the same no shirt, backwards ballcap vestments that grant Chad Smith his drumming powers, while avoiding the curse of looking more like Will Ferrell.
Highlights included the seven-minute opener Rays on Pinion and Cockroach En Fleur, a solo interlude fingerpicked by Gleeson on an acoustic guitar, and Swollen and Halo, a deliciously delirious ditty that sounded like Mastodon covering Oingo Boingo. The band did justice to their classic albums from 2007 and 2009 and kept the audience in the palm of their hands. Whether sagely nodding in place, smashing like atoms in a nuclear circle pit, or swaying with arms in the air, the fans reacted to all the many moods of Baroness’ open-minded metal. This is a band that a chill stoner and a prog metal band leader can enjoy equally.
Between album sets, Baisley acknowledged that it was heartbreakingly bittersweet to play in Los Angeles, where former drummer and founding member of Baroness, Allen Bickle, lived before he died at age 42, just weeks before the show. “Thank you for saving this night that could have been a terror for me,” he said, thanking the crowd for the energy that turned the night into a healing release.
After the show, as we spilt out into the gentrified hipster hideout that is Highland Park, I enjoyed seeing all the bars, vegan restaurants, and the vintage bowling alley overrun with black-shirted metalheads. I overheard someone talking about baking skull-shaped pancakes with weed butter. Mixing marijuana with metal and keenly aware of our own mortality, we headed home with the strength to carry on and enjoy the ride for as long as this life will let us.
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