I can’t tell you how long I have been waiting to catch Baroness live (or why I haven’t posted this concert review until now, Hahahaha), well actually I can… It has been about a year or so. I became a fan of the band back in 2007 when they released their first full length Red Album, which was so heavy and psychedelic sounding I honestly could not get enough of it. Then a couple years latter the band released Blue Record and for some strange reason I kind of fell out of love with their sound. I’m still not sure why this has happened, but I have since realized the error in my ways and have come to fully understand just how amazing Blue Record actually is.
Then in the summer of 2012 the band released in my opinion their best set of tunes of their career with Yellow & Green. I knew I was gonna absolutely gonna dig these albums when I heard the pre-release song “March to the Sea”. Once the double album came out I was finally convinced that Baroness were indeed a band that I truly enjoyed and that I needed to experience live. Then tragedy struck and Baroness were involved in a horrible bus crash and the bands touring plans and the actual existence of the band were put on hold. But after some serious dedication and rehab from John Baizley and also after recruiting a new rhythm section (bassist Nick Jost and drummer Sebastian Thomson) Baroness once again returned to the road. The band finally got around to stopping by Salt Lake City at the end of this past summer and boy howdy was it an amazing show.
I have honestly kind of forgotten specific details of the show and just how amazing this concert was, but after re-watching the video’s that Isaac filmed (both of which are included here) I was reminded at how spectacular the concert really was. I had never seen a band so thrilled to be on stage and playing music. All four members of the band especially Baizley and guitarist Peter Adams seemed so stoked to be playing at Urban Lounge that night and the crowd was totally sharing in Baroness’ joy. It almost seemed that crowd was part of the act as well, singing as loud as possible to every song that the band played. It was as if Baroness and the crowd had formed into one giant entity, with the joyous mob feeding the band and Baroness returning it right back to them with as much intensity and passion as possible. It was truly an amazing thing to experience and like I mentioned earlier it was something I had never experienced before. One thing I do specifically remember worrying about during Baroness’ performance that night was that the band wasn’t going to play “Isak”, which I had dubbed as Isaac’s theme song whether he approved of it or not, but after the band took a short break they began the encore with the song. This was the highlight of the show for me because “Isak” is probably one of my all time favorite songs and I didn’t think that this jam could get much better than the recorded version, but as you can see from the video below the band totally made it even more energetic and heavy than the version that is included on Red Album.
You could tell that the crowd at Urban that night was as grateful as I was to have Baroness back and healthy again. It was also more than apparent that the band was just as grateful to be back and they seemed more than thankful to be have the opportunity to rock everyone’s faces of that night, which they totally did.