Record #964: Baroness – Stone (2023)

I’m a relative newcomer to the Baroness faithful. After falling in love with Purple it took me until Gold & Grey to consider diving deeper into their back catalog. Red Album and Yellow & Green were the first and last records I bought in 2020, and that long digestion process convinced me that they were one of the best metal bands going today, offering a confounding blend of sludge metal, progressive rock, psychedelic, folk, and good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll that is above reproach. The phrase I kept using in those reviews were “they can do no wrong.”

I’ll admit, Stone is the biggest challenge to that assertion that they’ve offered. My first few listens—which I undertook while distracted—were a little underwhelming. I added them to my year end list out of necessity—I only had twenty-three and needed two more to round it out. Whether that was a self fulfilling prophecy or not, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I ordered it right after publishing that list, thinking, “how bad can it be? It’s friggin’ Baroness.”

And upon giving it a few close listens, I stand by that claim. Stone offers up plenty of their trademark brand of anthemic heavy metal while also stretching further into new sounds.

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Record #946: Body Void – Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth (2021)

They say music can soothe the savage beast. But what about the times when the music proves the more beastly of the two? The moments when the feral creature might run for safety from the music that is far more monstrous than it?

If you’re looking for the latter, consider Body Void’s Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth, a positively eldritch piece of sludge metal that leaves no wonder as to why anyone would call a genre that. It’s as black and thick as tar, and just like the thousands of specimens at Le Brea, there is no savage beast that bears a chance of survival.

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Record #934: Candlemass – Epicus Doomicus Metallicus (1986)

As they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in a metal record store in Stockholm’s old town, you buy one of the most important records Sweden’s considerable metal scene.

I had been meaning to buy a copy of Candlemass’s legendary debut for a while now anyway. But when I discovered that they’re from Upplands Väsby, the Stockholm suburb where my brother-in-law’s family lives and was hosting us—it felt like destiny.

Epicus Doomicus Metallicus isn’t the first doom metal record—Black Sabbath deserves credit for that over a decade previously (a point that the clerk at Sound Pollution and I made at the same time). But this record was the first to give it a name, and established a pretty sizable portion of its aesthetic.

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Record #901: Elder – Innate Passage (2022)

Elder has been one of my favorite active metal bands ever since I heard Reflections of a Floating World, a psychedelic sojourn through doomy riffs and Krautrock-esque instrumental passages. But ever since Lore, much of the discourse around Elder has focused on the balance between metal and prog rock, and as the band has continued, they seem to favor more and more of the latter with each release.

Innate Passage might pose the question of whether they have finally crossed the line between Metal and Not Metal, but Elder doesn’t seem very interested in debating it any further. Instead, they spend an hour offering up epic journeys through massive riffs, third-eye-opening solos, and the catchiest melodies they’ve ever released.

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Record #891: Dream Unending – Song of Salvation (2022)

It’s often said that music is a transcendent art—that it exceeds the sum of its parts, reaching beyond the mundane circumstances of our day to day. But if we’re being honest, an awful lot of music falls short of that promise. If I’m skimming the radio, there’s very little that might inspire even a shift in my mood, let alone an altered state of consciousness.

But every once in a while I’ll find a record that reminds me just how much power music has. A record that stretches my imagination beyond its usual limits and peels back the corners of the fabric of reality, even for just a moment. And if are once again being honest, a lot of musicians think this is what they’re doing, only to mire themselves in woo-woo pastiche and tired cliches.

In the case of Dream Unending’s sophomore record Song of Salvation though, those traps are avoided, in favor of long-form progressive death-doom metal that transcends not only its genre but its ambitions.

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Record #866: Nadja – Luminous Rot (2021)

I’ve been fostering a love of heavy, weird music for a while now—you can probably blame Sunbather for kicking me down that hill. But in the last year or so that I’ve been writing for Tuned Up, I’ve mucked about through darker, grimier swamps than I had ever expected, and enjoyed it far more than I would have ever thought.

One of the murkier records that I’ve fallen in love with in that time is Luminous Rot from the long-running drone/doomgaze duo Nadja. From first blush, it can feel oppressive and impenetrable, but there’s a tension between the thick, sludgy instrumentation and the almost tender songwriting that makes for an engaging listen.

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Record #860: Elder – Dead Roots Stirring (2011)

Ever since I heard Reflections of a Floating World, I have nurtured a low-key obsession with the Bostonian/German group’s brand of progressive, psychedelic doom metal. After following them to Omens, I’ve started working backward, picking up their back catalog as I can.

Dead Roots Stirring, their sophomore record, might not have anyone hoisting it up as the group’s best album, but this might contain their purest devotion to bands like Black Sabbath, Kyuss, and Sleep without the Rush worship that their later work has been criticized for.

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