BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME

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While the musicians are clearly competant here, the writing hasn't nearly reached its potential. Between the Buried and Me will eventually become one of the most incredible bands of this generation, but they still have significant growth to make at this particular point. The songs are heavy and relatively technical, with occasional soft sections, but it's lacking in experimentation and variety. The band will mature quite rapidly after this album, and so everything after this one is worth checking out. The only reason to check this one out is to be stunned at how far the group has come. This stands as a solid metalcore album, and not much more.

"Between the Buried and Me" is the self-titled debut full-length studio album by progressive/ experimental metal act Between the Buried and Me. I´ve only sporadically listened to their later efforts but I´ve read many praising reviews of "Alaska (2005)" and especially "Colors (2007)". That´s gotten me a bit curious and I´ve decided to review Between the Buried and Me´s albums from an end starting with this debut.

The music on the album is a mix of melodic metalcore, inspired as most metalcore acts are, by the melodic Swedish Gothenburg death metal sound and American hardcore which means that there are lots of hardcore elements in the sound as well as melodic metal parts. Lots of heavy breakdowns and extreme vocals in all styles. Take a pick. Deep growling, higher pitched screaming raw vocals and hardcore vocals, strange pig squeals and a few sections with clean vocals (I even heard a Rob Halford-like vocal part around the three minute mark in "Aspirations"). The album is often critizised for not being compositionally developed enough but I´m sure that critique is best understood if you compare the album to later releases by the band. Even though I don´t think that the album has any truly outstanding tracks the compositions are as good as most other bands in the genre. I don´t hear anything below standard on this album. I actually think there are more than one riff that kicks ass on the album. In addition to the more powerful and heavy sections on the album there are also some very melodic leads and several acoustic parts too.

The playing is technically challenging and the musicianship is excellent. Tight interplay and great performances all around.

The production is powerful but lacks a bit during the acoustic parts and the drums also have a bit of a strange sound. It´s pretty professional and solidly produced though.

I think "Between the Buried and Me" is a pretty good debut album by Between the Buried and Me and it deserves a 2.5 - 3 star rating. It might be pretty average for the genre but that doesn´t mean it´s not a quality product. I´ll be looking forward to listening to more albums by the band.

Hailing from North Carolina and after releasing their demo in 2001(entitled "Demo 2001"), Between the Buried and Me were able to release a debut full length studio album in 2002 entitled Between the Buried and Me.

I think this happens to be a fairly diverse and fairly creative album. It's quite clear the band had a very obvious metalcore aesthetic, but musically this isn't just plain jane metalcore. While some metalcore bands are more towards the more hardcore punk driven side of metalcore, Between the Buried and Me show more of a melodic metalcore sound that seems to draw influence and has somewhat of a style you can hear in many of the Swedish Gothenburg bands, like At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquility. But as I said above, this isn't a pure metalcore album, so there is some groove metal sounds, grindcore, death metal, technical death metal, some quieter moments that are perhaps somewhat indie inspired. So in addition to the melodic guitar lines of Swedish melodic death metal, there are some more chromatic and dissonant sounding death metal riffs too, as well, as well as the odd pentatonicism to add a southern metal vibe (think, Pantera groove metal style) to the proceedings. Compositionally, I think this album is pretty solid and definitely very clearly progressive metal, if perhaps not quite as progressive say "Images and Words" or Opeth's "Still Life". What I didn't like so much is that it sounds somewhat confused at times, like the band wasn't completely sure what they were aiming for. Some bands can pull of the switching vocal styles well without sounding too odd or albums by bands did that well, but here, as I said, it just comes across as confused at times. They'll be a metalcore vocal style happening courtesy of Tommy Rogers (admittedly not the best metalcore vocal tone either) then straight into a death growled vocal style (again, not the best vocal tone/not the best growls out there) but it seemed to lack clear focus and direction.

However, that aside, there are plenty of very cool riffs to be heard, great drumming and bass playing and a high level of technical skill on display too but fortunately doesn't come across as overly technical. For example, in Shevanel Cut a Flip, there is a riff that really screams Pantera influence, but yet despite that it just grabs you and just sounds very very cool.

Again, back to the composition which I didn't cover a lot of ground on earlier, this album is very solid in this regard. At times it's not totally focused but it's generally quite good and fairly coherent sounding. It's clear these guys have been listening to some progressive metal in addition to the straight death, groove, thrash and grindcore stuff, because some of it really does flow quite nicely and keeps you interested enough to want to listen from start to finish.

I'd say Shevanel Cut a Flip manages to be both the highlight and the downpoint of the album. First 2/3rds of the track are great. I love how it's quite heavy and quite progressive and goes into this lovely clean guitar part with clean vocals and nice chord voicings and melodies played on guitar (Paul Waggoner on lead guitar, not only here but throughout the whole album, Nick Fletcher on rhythm), After about 7 minutes it does seem to lose it a bit. Seemed kind of like an attempt at a minimalistic ending, but honestly I just think it wasn't necessary to really extend the track much over 7 minutes, because unlike really good minimalistic stuff that has elements added over time to add interest, it's just really the same thing played over and over again with the melody guitar section eventually dropping out, which doesn't add much more interest anyway I think.

Production wise, sonically anyway, it's nothing to write home about, but it's nothing bad either.

So all in all, Between the Buried and Me is a very solid and more than competent album with great music, although neither is this insanely amazing either and has some occasional weak spots and some slightly dull moments from time to time.

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.