I’m gonna keep this short n’ sweet, because we’ve already expressed many times how much we love this album. But if a few of you need some graphics of horns to really convince you to go out and buy this thing, so be it.

In a perfect world, Blue Record (no “the”) would make Baroness one of the biggest bands in the world today. There just aren’t a lot of bands making rock music this good anymore – forget metal, I’m just talking good, old fashioned rock music, as it was meant to be.

It was meant  to be loud and aggressive and sexy. Listening to it was meant to make you feel good.

Listening to Blue Record will make you feel good.

Like a certain Atlanta band to whom they are often compared, Baroness have probably spent as much time listening to Yes and Animals as they have Sabbath.  Blue Record is hard, but not necessarily angry. There are people who will mosh at a Baroness show, but those people are kind of douchie, and you shouldn’t aspire to be like them.

Blue Record is, at its heart, a classic rock record. Yes, it sounds kinda retro, but in this case, “retro” is kind of synonymous with “human.” The guitar rolls, the bass slinks, the drums are big and warm. At no point will you wonder if a computer helped make this album, even if it’s entirely possible that computers did help make this album.

Blue Record isn’t the heaviest album of the year, isn’t the most evil album of the year, isn’t the most br00tal album of the year. But it might be the best album of the year. It’s more likely to instill in you the desire to make out with your girlfriend or boyfriend than to kill her or him. But, at least for this critic, that’s a big part of its appeal. We’ve had plenty of great, Satanic records this year. An aural massage is just what the doctor ordered in the tail end of ’09.

So. In case you still need some horns graphics to convince you to go buy this thing:

(4 1/2 out of 5 horns)

-AR