ALASKA

Between the Buried and me shot out a really great one in 2005, defining their more progressive style with Alaska. The album is a great mix of death metal, metalcore, and whatever the hell the band feels like at any given time, including jazz, alternative, synthpop, latin, and ambient. Great creativity on the band's part with this one.

This album can be extremely intense at times. Although metalcore itself is a popular genre and easy to listen to, Between the Buried and Me combines it with a lot of metal styles that may be hard to digest for prog listeners, including death metal and even grindcore (as evidenced in the song "Croakies and Boatshoes". However, prog fans jump all over their trademark genre jumping, as mentioned before.

There are quite a few tracks that are worth listening to on the album. Songs like the opener "All Bodies" and "Backwards Marathon" contain some excellent refrains that will get stuck in the listeners' heads for long periods of time. Other tracks like "Roboturner" and "Croakies and Boatshoes" are full on metal and mathcore assaults. Any prog fan who has listened to the album will ultimately also pick out the track "Selkies: The Endless Obsession", which after a couple minutes of tech metal it turns into some beautiful clean guitar solos leading into an absolutely wonderful melodic progression backing it up.

Overall, prog fans should go nuts over Between The Buried and me's eclecticism and ability to pull any musical style off in Alaska. And although the band wasn't always focusing on the certain aspect of their music, their uncanny ability to compose beautiful, catchy, and beautiful melodies and harmonies in the albums. Ultimately, the relentless extreme metal aspects of this album may tend to push people over the edge, but otherwise it's a great album.