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My Favorite Track Off The New Between The Buried And Me Album
I'm not sure if I have made it clear before, but I am a big fan of the experimental metal band Between the Buried and Me. During my high school and college years I was into metal in a big way, playing in a metal band and attending shows nearly every weekend. I fell off the metal bandwagon so to speak near the end of college and don't listen to the genre nearly as much as I used to. Between the Buried and Me, however, is the exception. I adore the band with their incredibly intricate coordination and staunch opposition to the idea that a metal band needs to only play metal. They use metal as a way to connect all the different genres they feel like dabbling in record to record.
Their newest album, The Parallax II: Future Sequence released on Tuesday, October 9, and it's fantastic. It's all over the place in terms of genre, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocal work. Between the Buried and Me's lead singer is fully comfortable doing more than just growling into a microphone, and I love it.
I wanted to point out a specific track on the new album called Bloom. It's not their best song, and it's not the most technically impressive, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why I adore these guys as much as I do, and all in under four minutes (BtBaM songs can sometimes go as long as 11 minutes).
0:00 - What the hell? I thought this was metal. That's sounds like piano hammering.
0:30 - When does the metal start. Did I just hear a slide whistle?
1:00 - Okay, there's the metal.
1:19 - This sounds like a 60s super hero TV series theme song. I can see the animated Adam West driving the batmobile all over the screen.
2:00 - The metal is back now, but it sounds remarkably similar to that insane piano riff from earlier, as though it were a brilliant reimagination of what set the whole song in motion to begin with.
2:30 - What the hell is going on here? Is that another slide whistle?
3:00 - And just a little more metal with absurd levels of coordination to close out the song. I think they changed time signature at least three times during the course of that finale.
Here's an excellent sampling of the whole album, if you want to get a better idea.
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