BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME

Well, as the saying goes, you have to start somewhere. And while Between the Buried and Me are one of the leaders in this day and age in progressive metal, this album is not a good showcasing of that. It does however have its moments from time to time.

There are two things I must point out about Between the Buried and Me. As much as I enjoy them, they are not a band for everyone. They are relentlessly brutal most of the time, the music is ridiculously heavy during these moments, and they drew much of their early influence from metalcore (they still do, but it isn't as apparent in their music anymore) which is quite apparent on this release. The second is that they are a band who I honestly don't think can truly disappoint me with whatever kind of music they decide to make. And while their self-titled debut is my least favorite effort by the band so far, I've heard much worse than this. This album is quite good for the right mood, which is a mood where I just want to hardcore dance and/or break stuff by jumping around and running into it. This album for the most part either takes lots of influences from other bands (Pantera is one that comes to mind) or is relentlessly heavy. While BtBaM would later learn to add variation through more clean parts as well as mixing around the heaviness in different ways, this is for the most part fairly technical metalcore with a few progressive tendencies here and there. The best example of this is of course in the final 9:24 track "Shevanel Cut a Flip". The song is so heavy, but incredibly progressive and much more similar to what Between the Buried and Me would do on The Silent Circus and Alaska, two albums in which they would greatly refine their sound. The ending part does drag on a bit for me, but otherwise it's a very good song. The rest are for the most part slightly above yout average metalcore song.

I could stretch it and say this is a 3.5 star album for me, but the production does suffer a bit here. Like most of the music, it's not bad, but it's nothing to be proud of either. So I can't rate this any higher than 3 stars. Good if you want to check out how far Between the Buried and Me have come in the last decade, but not good for much else.