You're not supposed to judge a book by its cover -- but unfortunately, more often than not, you can easily judge a band by its album cover. Especially metal bands. Is there a skull• A monster• Some blood• Even a creepy Germanic font is a dead giveaway. But Baroness -- in town Friday night at Garfield Artworks -- is a different beast entirely, which is obvious on the cover of "The Red Album." It would be hard to pick these otherwise nondescript hairy guys from Savannah, Ga., out of a crowd. But the cover is a stunningly weird, psychedelic tableau of Greek goddess-like female figures with garlands of scarab-shaped jewels and other strange symbols -- wheels made of birds, heaps of flame-colored flowers. You can't pin down the music from the cover, but it gives you some clues -- something challenging, expansive, complex and very heavy is going on here. "For this album, I asked everyone in the band to give me an idea -- an image, metaphor or something out of the blue, that related to them, and the process of writing this record," says guitarist-vocalist John Baizley, who also does all the art for Baroness. "So I got a mixed bag of images and themes. Essentially, I tied all those images and themes together, representing everyone in the band and perhaps something deeper." Baroness is a metal band, but a very strange one -- full of unexpected melody, long, discursive instrumental passages, acoustic interludes amid explosions of raging guitar. Imagine stalwart avant-garde rockers Fugazi recast as a Southern metal band, and you're in the ballpark. There's plenty of doom-laden, Black Sabbath-inflected riffage, but in the distance, you can hear the bluesy boogie of The Allman Brothers. Along with bands like Kylesa and Mastodon, Baroness is part of a new crop of challenging, unusual metal bands coming out of Georgia at the moment. "It's not like there's a ton of bands, and a few getting elevated," Baizley says. "It's a very tight-knit community. There's maybe three other bands in Savannah, and they've all experienced success touring internationally. There's a few bands from Atlanta and from Athens. I think the fact that there's such a small, limited audience for this stuff in Georgia, is (the reason) it forces us to look outward. It's very healthy for competition and mutual growth." Savannah's dark, weird Southern Gothic atmosphere definitely influences the band's sound. "A good pop-culture reference is 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,'" Baizley explains. "That's not the Savannah that I know, specifically, but there's an intensity of eccentricity here. It's a very strange climate -- it's incredibly swampy, incredibly hot and humid all the time. There's the Spanish moss hanging and sagging -- it's a really oppressive feel. "That has colored the people and the music here in a very particular way. I think that's one of the reasons the music from here tends to be so heavy." Additional Information:

Baroness

With: Onodrim, Dutch Buchanan When: 8 p.m. Friday Where: Garfield Artworks , Garfield Admission: $7-$8 Details: 412-361-2262

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