Between the Buried and Me is a metalcore/progressive metal band from North Carolina. Yeah, the -core suffix scared me too, even kept me from trying their last album, Colors, for a while. When I finally played it, however, I was blown away. First off, the band are technical geniuses. The guitar work is astounding and the drums are great. They have a font of great original ideas, a font of great ideas they ripped off from other bands and blended together beautifully. These guys are music freaks and it shows: they just know music back and front.
First off, I’ll address the elephant in the room: the vocals. Yes, the lead singer does that somewhat annoying scream thing that scares all good and decent people away from metal. While not my favorite vocal delivery, I put up with it because everything else is so brilliant, and I got used to it quite quickly. His attempts at singing boil down further into a somewhat weak falsetto, and then an okay singing voice. It has gotten better since the band’s earlier work, but I do concede vocals are the weak point of the music.
The Great Misdirect makes up for this with roughly 50 minutes of madness. Well, not the full 59-minute run time of the album, mind you, as two of the six songs are breathers: intro “Mirrors,” features elegantly latticed guitar work with an almost salsa structure, while “Desert of Song” is a quiet number, fitting that desert/western niche to a T. The rest I assure you, is pure unadulterated madness.
You know when a guitar part has something intangible and just “rocks”? BTBAM manages to do that on “Disease, Injury, Madness” during the solo that hits at around seven minutes. That isn’t to say that BTBAM is “coolz;” they’re not all that serious about the music. Case in point: this “rocking” solo is preceded by the traditional stock sound effect of a horse whinnying. It’s not hidden, but it’s not at the forefront—it’s just so monumentally stupid that it’s funny. I did a sonic double take the first time I heard it (that is to say, I rewound it and played it back).
Musically speaking, BTBAM go all over the place. The band continues its tradition of putting out material that sounds like off-kilter circus music with the beginning of “Fossil Genera – A Feed From Cloud Mountain” (probably my favorite song off the album actually, though it does sound like a Dream Theater rip-off at points). Tribal drumming kicks off an 18-minute epic “Swim to the Moon.” Jazz influences are sprinkled throughout the album. The reason I never let the -core sound bother me too much is that the band is so schizophrenic that if a part I don’t like comes up, I know it’ll be gone in a minute or two. They’ve seemed to evolve into the “Progressive” part of their Linnean-type genre classification to the point where they, like a hummingbird, must keep moving around, drinking their weight in nectar. Except instead of drink their weight in nectar, it’s… genres, I think. I kinda lost the metaphor.
If you couldn’t tell, I love The Great Misdirect, plain and simple. We plan on eloping and moving somewhere far off, and yes, I do need psychiatric help for anthropomorphizing an album in my head, teaching it to love me and me alone, and trying to steal it away. The people at Best Buy generally frown up that, most specifically that latter “stealing” part.
Leave a Reply