It has come to my attention that I've only made one thread on this board. This should fix that.

Between the Buried and Me is an American progressive metal band, formed in North Carolina in 2000 by vocalist Tommy Giles Rogers and guitarist Paul Waggoner.

The band's style is rooted in technical death metal, or metalcore on their earlier releases, but is commonly punctuated with passages that showcase their various musical influences. These can range to anything from country, blues, alternative rock, sometimes even polka. These sections can sometime be really, really fucking weird, which is made somewhat more impressive by the fact that most of the members are straight edge. It's the kind of stuff that just makes you wonder, "how the hell did they come up with this shit?"

Their first 3 albums are kinda "meh," in my opinion. The band released their first truly amazing work in 2007 with their album Colors, and since then have only gotten better. If you're into death metal, progressive music, or "hardcore" music, then Colors is an album that you absolutely must hear.

Discography:
Between the Buried and Me (2002)
The Silent Circus (2003)
Alaska (2005)
Colors (2007)
The Great Misdirect (2009)
The Parallax Hypersleep Dialogues (2011)
The Parallax II: Future Sequence (2012)

I'm also gonna include their live album, Colors Live. I swear, they're one of the best live acts I've (n)ever seen. I love how they don't particularly rely on elaborate stage shows or insane antics to wow their audience; they entertain by the sheer epicness of their music.
Also, it's really amazing that they can actually remember how all of their music goes. I must've listened to Colors over 15 times now, and parts of it still manage to surprise me!

My little cousin absolutely adores these guys. I've been meaning to check out Colors for a while now, still haven't gotten around to it.

...guess I should change that, huh?
Good thread, dude.

still haven't listened but the board needs cleaning, so I'll take this up to the top as both a reminder for me and a bump for mankind.

I had friends who got me into this band and I absolutely loved them! "Colors" and "The Great Misdirect" are amazing records, and I like how the band will not stick to any one particular genre in their music even though it's primarily Progressive Metal. Good stuff. :)

Bump

These guys have a new album on the way. "Coma Ecliptic" comes out in a few months on July 7th.
Too long, if you ask me.

Its apparently gonna be rock opera about a "man in a coma journeying through his past lives." It's good that they've chosen a more conceptual blueprint rather than a story based one because this band is and always has been about the music more than the lyrics. If you can understand any of what Tommy Giles is saying half of the time, you're a better metalhead than I.

The track they've released Memory palace is probably one of their most accessible track to date, (well, with the exception of some of their more mellow stuff off of the first two albums) and I'd actually recommend it as a pretty good point of entry if you're not accustomed to the more extreme side of metal. Give it a listen, people, tell me what you think.

This is probably the first album of this year that I'm really looking forward to.

>>6
Still haven't checked out any previous material from this band (shame on me), but "Memory Palace" is great. I don't remember if we've talked at all about Haken (probably have), but they're awesome and their most recent work reminds me a lot of this.

I'll keep an eye out for this release. Seems promising enough. Cool album art too. /o/

So now that Coma Ecliptic's had some time to settle, I'm gonna articulate (ramble) some of my thoughts on it. In short, however, it's a different but worthy addition to their discog.

Between the Buried and Me's always been a band that's taken you on a journey with their music. In the past, it's been through long, sprawling.... I guess you could call them songs, but they were so scattered that their albums worked better as collections of musical ideas rather than a collection of coherent "songs." Coma Ecliptic, however, eschews this somewhat, which each song having some more easily defined characteristics and motifs. It makes listening to the album a less daunting task than the rest of their post-Alaska work, which demanded your attention else you miss something amazing. Rather, Coma Ecliptic will throw something awesome at you, and then as soon as it starts to get too "wankery-y" pulls you back in via a catchy hook, either on the vocals or the guitar. It serves as a good way of keeping tracks from becoming too random. The randomness is still there, but it's more restrained and as such some of the technicality of the playing feels more impressive than it did on their past stuff.

There's a lot more clean singing, and t's definitely their most accessible album yet, which is ironic since it's probably the furthest they've ever strayed from their metalcore-oriented sound. It actually reminds me a lot of Dream Theater at times, which I welcome since Dream Theater's been disappointing me since A Dramatic Turn of Events.

4.3/5.