BARONESS
"The feeling I had down there every day was kind of like being 7 years old and playing inside a huge cardboard box with homemade weapons and an imaginary friend. The box was anything you wanted it to be. A space ship, a fire engine, a cave, a mountain, a river. That's what the basement was to us. Our safe haven, were no matter what time of the day it was always 80 degrees and pitch black. It was home. "
An incredible first full length and major label debut for Baroness has pushed them to the forefront of underground metal. Combining thunderous riffs, roaring vocals and crashing drums, the Savanah based band has created a monumental record that soars, thanks to its mainly instrumental focus. With their music created in the same vein as former label mates Mastodon, the "Red Album" [out on Relapse] is an epic math-metal and prog-infused masterwork that never slows down- save for when the acoustic rears its beautiful head at just the right moments.
Words | Summer Welch
Savannah. It's hot down here. Especially during the summer months. The summer of 2006 was so hot I think every consecutive day we broke records for hottest day of the year.
It was during that summer that we wrote the bulk of the songs on Red Album.
Savannah has always been a tough place to be a band in due to the fact that practice space is kind of hard to come by. You can get away with jamming in your house for a while but people usually complain after a short time. When John and I first moved to savannah we were practicing in a two-car garage in a pretty gnarly neighborhood. We got away with it for a while but then a cop showed up one day beating the crap out of the door. I went out and he was standing there with his hands on his hips looking at me with a cocked head and a shitty grin: "Is there a problem officer?" I said.
"Yep, got some complaints from the neighbors, said yall are being too loud." There was a very awkwardly long pause and then just as I was about to try and muster up something to say he continued: "Sounds to me though that yall are pretty good. To bad the neighbors don't think so. But If I get called back here again for noise complaints then I got to give yall a ticket. Doesn't mean you should stop practicing though, I mean where would Hendrix be today if he didn't get to practice?"
"I don't know", I said.
"He would be alive, probably smoking crack on that corner over there, with his thumb up his ass. Yall take care."
He told me he was going to help me find somewhere to practice where we would not be bothering anyone, then he got in his car and left. I never heard from him again and shortly after that we had to leave because the landlord got pissed that we were using his garage with out his knowing.
The point is, there are not a whole lot of secure, nice places to practice here. However, we were fortunate enough to have a dear friend that just happened to own the local punk and metal club in down town Savannah. With the exception of a few blocks in the center, there are no basements in Savannah because the water table is so low. The Jinx happens to be on one of those blocks, and it was in the basement there that we were able to practice. The only catch was that because the restaurants and bars that surround the Jinx open up between three and four ever afternoon, and the fact that we had conflicting work schedules we had to practice from 11am to 3pm everyday.
Writing and playing early in the day as apposed to night is very different. At the time two of us were working in bars till 4 or 5 in the morning, while the
other two were working 8 to 5 schedules, two were always just waking up and two were wide awake and ready to go all the time. That coupled with the dark basement where the only lights we had were a string of colorful Christmas bulbs made for a very interesting mix of moods ideas, and feelings.
The heat and the darkness definitely found its way into our hands and our thoughts and colored the songs in a very interesting and natural way.
We kind of made that basement our second home. Not to say that we stayed there longer then the three our four hours a day we allotted practice, but I think it was
a place where we all felt safe and in our element. There was no one to bother us and because it was dark and dingy down there you sort of forgot where you were and lost track of time. Because of the time we had to practice by the time we got going every one was amped from caffeine or all ready being up for four hours, or both.
We didn't really consume any alcohol during the writing process, which I think made a difference in some way. I've heard that you think more clearly when you are hungry. Not starved and mal nurtured, but just hungry. Being hungry and knowing that you can eat at some point in the near future is such a great feeling.
Point being, we where always hungry when we went down for whatever reason we would always wait to eat until after practicing. When we first set up our gear it was a total mess. Years of stockpiling broken beer coolers, busted radios, barstools, and oddly enough there seemed to be a host of eerie manikins. Mostly severed at the waist, placed about the basement in random spots. There was one that sat at the top of the steps that descended to the basement. She had one arm and a mask of peacock feathers. Every time I would turn on the light she would freak me out. This half naked one-armed peacock woman staring me down.
The light from the Christmas bulbs only allowed visibility in a small radius surrounding our gear, so if you strayed out of the light you were always bound to trip over something strange. Over the months we kind of built up barricades with crap around our stuff, so it was sort of fortress like. At some point someone found neon Budweiser sign and plugged that in.
The feeling I had down there every day was kind of like being 7 years old and playing inside a huge cardboard box with homemade weapons and an imaginary friend. The box was anything you wanted it to be. A space ship, a fire engine, a cave, a mountain, a river. That's what the basement was to us. Our safe haven, were no matter what time of the day it was always 80 degrees and pitch black. It was home.
Later that fall we left for Europe to embark on an eight-week tour with our friends Torche. We used the shows as a drawing board for some of the new songs, and by the end of the tour we were totally comfortable with about half of them playing to a live audience. When we entered the world famous Jam Room the following spring to record Red Album we were well practiced with about 95 percent of the album. The other 5 percent was somewhat birthed in the studio during the 12 days we were there.
Recording is always such a different experience then playing live. We are aware that our strength lies in our live show, and we really focused on expressing that in the recording. Of course you inevitably loose that raw energy that can only be experienced live, but we did our best to make the Jam Room more comfortable and home like to accommodate our needs. When we were there we were not sure how it would come out sounding.
We had done a rough demo of some of the songs but we all went into it with open minds and and no real concrete idea of what it should sound like. In the end thanks largely in part to a wonderful team of people, Jay Matheson, Steve Slavic, and Phillip Cope, we got something that I feel confident in saying that everyone was really stoked about.
We no longer practice in that basement. And I don't think I would want to return there. It was the perfect place for that time frame and I want to remember it for that. We have not begun writing our next album, but maybe that’s because we haven't found the right place to write it yet. Wherever it may be I look forward to the next round. I'm sure it will be equally as rewarding if not more. Until then, gangst up!
Words | Summer Welch 