Between the Buried and Me - "Colors"

Between the Buried and Me - (B)The Decade of Statues (Victory 2007)

Between the Buried and Me - Colors / Victory

I've always shied away from hype. Movies, music, whatever . . . anything with a ton of publicity behind it immediately makes me lose interest. I can't help it; it's just the way I'm wired. Discovering new things should be organic, natural, unforced. It was in this way that I discovered North Carolina quintet Between the Buried and Me (BTBAM). Touring in support of their 2002, self-titled album, BTBAM shared the tour with the Red Chord (also in support of their first album, Fused Together in Revolving Doors) and Premonitions of War (also touring on their first album, The True Face of Panic), and blew me away with their technical-but-catchy brand of hardcore and metal. Released on Goodfellow records (later reissued on Victory), Between the Buried and Me is a rough but enjoyable harbinger of great things to come. 2003's The Silent Circus stepped up the songwriting considerably, but it was 2005's Alaska that really made people pay attention. Now, it's 2007 and September brings us the release of Colors.

Right from the get-go, it's obvious that the "Pink Floyd of metal" tag that was branded onto the band by critics (myself included) may have gone to their heads, but only as permission to do whatever the fuck they want with heavy music. The thing about the BTBAM and Pink Floyd comparison is this: they're both capable of sonically fucking around but remaining true to their core. In the case of Pink Floyd, their music stretched beyond your stereotypical '60s and '70s rock into psychedelia, remaining catchy in spite of incredibly long songs and overwrought concepts like The Wall. And for the most part, Pink Floyd were successful, both critically and on the charts. BTBAM will never reach the sales triumph that is Dark Side of the Moon (741 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 and over 40 million copies sold), but so far, they're taking your standard metalcore in directions yet uncharted on their own, underground-ish level.

Colors opens with piano and soft singing, but it's only :55 before the rest of the band kicks in on a grandiose, "they're here!" type of riff. The 2:13 opening track ("Foam Born (A) The Backtrack") ends in a ride-cymbal-based blastbeat and immediately gives way to a hi-hat-based blastbeat on the 5:20 "(B)The Decade of Statues," which churns and chugs on to the 6:47 "Informal Gluttony," which in turn transitions into the 10:58 "Sun of Nothing," which finally takes us to the 13:10 "Ants of the Sky." Whew. Just over halfway there. BTBAM could be accused of just slopping riffs together, but if you've ever heard a metal or hardcore band that actually does that, it's painfully obvious that a lot of care is put into transitions and how riffs fit together in BTBAM's practice space.

As a metal lover, I have this thing with clean singing on albums that are marketed as "heavy." The screaming-verse-sung-chorus thing needs to go, first of all. Some bands are getting crafty (see Divine Heresy with their sort-of all-star lineup and differently-placed clean vocals) with the vocals that make it OK for mom and dad to give the purchase go-ahead, but BTBAM have really figured out how to retain a sense of melody while still going for the throat. From the aforementioned introduction of the album to straight-blasting passages, the guitars always seem to have some sort of hook going on, even if it's buried (pardon the pun) under riffing chaos. The clean-singing passages that BTBAM incorporate into their songs usually work as part of a larger theme, as they don't really have standard verses or choruses (how can you in a 13-minute song?). Maybe vocalist Tommy Rogers is complimenting a keyboard or guitar line, but generally the songs on Colors get really worked up and suddenly devolve into something unexpected and much mellower (see the numerous Iron Maiden-style scale-solos), where screaming just won't work. A hardcore band at heart, BTBAM incorporate many, many grooves and stutteringly-complex riffs (check the bass drum versus guitar on the provided MP3 up top) into the chaos of their songs, reminding the listener a number of times over the course of Colors that while they have melody and nice-guy singing, they're still not to be fucked with.

Of course, due to this album's density, the eight here are seamlessly put tied together, giving Colors an old-school, dynamic feel of an album, not just a bunch of songs on an album. You can't have a 10-minute song just end . . . it has to keep going! While this seems a little overwhelming, it's only because music listeners (even the most devoted ones) have been at least partially trained to just hear the best songs on any given record. It can be a little mind-bending when all of the songs on a release (some of them incredibly long) actually require us to pay attention to what the hell is going on. Once we do, though, it's an incredibly rewarding experience.