Baroness - Rays on Pinion

Quick, name a good thing about metal music. Barring the copious opportunities it allows to make purchases of grease paint, it’s a sure bet that lots of the answers pitched to your screens involve the sheer amount of unique facets of different metal acts. Name it and you’ll find it – stuff that melts your face, stuff that melts your brain; if you’ve heard one thing, you’ve probably not heard another and that is always a brilliant excuse to go out searching for something new. 

Heavy metal giants of Savannah, Georgia, Baroness have many good ideas on what makes a unique metal track. Is it soul-crushing depth and soul-searching lyricism? Is it spine-crushing riffs and drum beats that could knock your house over? Hell, why not both of those at seemingly random intervals to each other?  What sets Baroness into the special class of progressive, sludgy excellence is their manner of making seemingly impossible compositions out of completely opposing elements. How anything can be this delicate and this brutal at the same time, or at different times in the same song, is one for the scientists, honestly. 

We are no scientists, but we work hard in the Rock Song of the Week mines to bring you all gold every single Friday; this week we’ve uncovered a nugget as big as your head. Equal parts beautiful and a barrage of sludge-induced head trauma, Rays on Pinion is one of those incredibly rare songs that does so many things and does them all ridiculously close to perfect. Savour this one, because that seven or so minute runtime is going to evaporate before you realise it’s over. Then you’ll have no choice but to be a productive member of society again, and we can’t in good conscience have that.