BTBAM paint their masterpiece.

Between The Buried And Me - Colors

[4.5/5]

Between The Buried And Me's Colors covers so much musical terrain, listeners might feel phantom physical fatigue. It's essentially one 65-minute song-broken into eight tracks for convenience and bookended by a serene piano solo-and this mammoth composition incorporates grinding metal, jazzy syncopation, exotic snake-charming melodies, dream-sequence psychedelics, choppy hardcore and a country hoedown. Epic journeys demand dramatic tension, which the group's harmonic guitars deliver with triumphant resonance: Every dual-ax salvo feels as climactic as a grandiose good-and-evil showdown in a fantasy film. Tommy Rogers growls through much of the record, making his clean vocals seem gorgeously fragile. When he sings hazily about floating ("Sun Of Nothing") and flying ("Ants Of The Sky"), the tunes take entrancing hallucinatory detours. Colors gets immensely heavy at times, in both the staggered-breakdown and thrash-blitzkrieg senses of the term, but Between The Buried And Me have evolved into a progressive band in the truest sense of the word, an alchemic group who concoct innovative, multi-genre fusions rather than a metal outfit with experimental pretensions. During the closing track "White Walls," Rogers chants the prescient epitaph, "We will be remembered for this." Not only will metal/hardcore fans remember Colors, they might be still struggling decades down the line to fully comprehend its brilliance. (VICTORY) Andrew Miller

ROCKS LIKE:
The Dillinger Escape Plan's Miss Machine
Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour
Helloween's Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part One

IN-STORE SESSION WITH VOCALIST/KEYBOARDIST TOMMY ROGERS:

Was Colors conceived as a single composition?

The first song I wrote was in the very middle, "Ants Of The Sky." We wrote from that song to the end, then went back and wrote a beginning. It was like a big puzzle. I think it flows well, and it sounds like a real album, like they made in the '70s. You could put a movie to this record. It has so many different moods, climaxes and downfalls.

Is Colors as cohesive lyrically as it is musically?

It's not a concept record, but there are recurring themes. I moved recently [to Baton Rouge, Louisiana], so I fly home a lot to practice, and I wrote most of this record on airplanes. I think that shows, both in direct mentions of flying and also just lyrics about feeling free and getting away from everyday life to examine the choices you've made.

On The Anatomy Of, you covered a wide spectrum of bands from Queen to Blind Melon. Is that versatility something you were able to build from in your songwriting for Colors?

The Anatomy Of really helped us learn about recording and playing different types of music. When we did that record, we wondered, "Are people going to hate us for this?" because it was different bands than people were expecting. But we got a great reaction. Obviously, we're a metal band, and that will never change, but we're huge music fans, and we want to incorporate a lot more styles of music. I look at us as the type of band that listeners can get excited about our new releases because they don't know what to expect.

During "Ants Of The Sky," the song seems to mosey into a saloon, where there's some jug-band bass and clinking glasses. How did that section come together?

Our guitarist Paul [Waggoner] wrote that part when we were working on Alaska. When we put that part in "Ants," we thought about creating a bar-fight scene. We did six or seven takes of fake fighting, random hooting and hollering [and] pool balls getting hit together.

As a North Carolina native, do you have any experience in rough rural joints?

None of us are really bar guys, so I've never been in that environment. I wouldn't consider us the kind of rednecks who go to saloons and pick fights. We're just Southern dudes who are down to earth. That's something we always want our fans to know-we're not super-big rock stars who are too good to appreciate our fans. As big as this kind of music is getting, bands are starting to forget that. Andrew Miller


Official Website: http://www.betweentheburiedandme.com


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