Between the Buried and Me – Colors
Victory Records (9/18/07)
Progressive metal / Metalcore / ????
Many albums are released and declared as great; few are released and considered an event.
Such is the case with Between the Buried and Me’s latest album, Colors.
There isn’t another genre-bending band this extreme in the music scene today. The band incorporates so many elements to its sound, with a calculated precision, that upon the first couple of listens it’s almost hard to wrap your mind around what has been created. And it hasn’t really crafted an album. Rather, Colors is a journey across a musical soundscape. Sure, the album is split into eight tracks, but each bleeds into the next, shifting from genre to genre at a sometimes breakneck pace, but always with a purpose.
Take the opener “Foam Born”—the song kicks off with a soulful piano opening, with vocals reminiscent of late Beatles material, before devolving into a hardcore dirge. The vocal harmonies drifting over the hard-rock riffing gives way to a solid synthesizer bridge before the death-metal vocals kick in. And somehow the band manages to get it to all make sense, musically.
It’s hard to take this album track to track—at just over a hour in length, it was made to be experienced in full, instead of in separate pieces. It’s important to make note of the high points of the album—from the melodic vocal bridge on “Informal Gluttony†and the driving drumming throughout “White Walls”, to the mellow, psychedelic guitar play on “Viridian”, the intricate prog guitar work on the mammoth “Ants of the Sky” (an over 13-minute opus) and the absolutely breathtaking guitar play on “Prequel to the Sequel” (giving way to the almost polka-esque breakdown mid-way through the song).
And if forced, one would easily point to “Sun of Nothing” as the album’s high point. From the rapid-fire drum and death metal opening, to the acoustic guitar bridges and combination clean and hardcore vocals, to the jazz-influenced mid-song breakdown, the European metal-flavored guitar riffs … this song just seems to have a little of everything. And it’s presented in a perfect package, with each segment flowing from piece to piece so that, even though the styles are so drastically different, it makes perfect sense to shift to the next part.
Each minute of Colors is a surprise. The band does a fantastic job of pushing the boundaries of the music it creates. There’s (maybe) a minute or two where it almost misses the mark, but it’s hard not to with music this experimental. If you ever wanted to know what it would sound like if Obituary, Remembering Never, Tool and Pink Floyd were one band, pick up this album. If you want to hear musical limits pushed to the boundaries, pick up this album. If you want to hear one of the best albums of the year (and maybe decade), pick up this album.
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