CD Review

Between The Buried
and Me
Alaska
(Victory)

It tends to be tough for bands like Between the Buried and Me to break through to a large audience. They play a style of metal/hardcore that most people do not enjoy listening to for particularly long periods of time.

They tend to change tempos and riffs once every 10 seconds or so, occasionally limiting their audience to those with a particularly severe case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  

There have been a handful of notable bands to play this music over the years, such as Victory Records alumni Deadguy, and Botch, who just now, a couple years after their breakup, seem to be getting the recognition they so richly deserve.  

Most recently, we have the Dillinger Escape Plan, who took this style of music to a whole new level, before realizing that if they were going to have any crossover appeal whatsoever, they were going to have to add some actual structure and melody to the brutality.

Between The Buried and Me seems to be on the way to that realization with this, their third album, but they’re not quite there yet.  

The 11 songs on Alaska are punctuated with all sorts of musical flourishes. Guitarists Paul Waggoner and Dusty Waring are extremely accomplished at their instruments, which becomes obvious right from the tight sweeping of the title track, right to the strange breakdowns all through the album that obviously indicate the guitarists had some sort of jazz schooling.  

The most interesting parts of this album, however, are the melodic parts scattered throughout.

Vocalist Tommy Rogers has an excellent singing voice, and the band writes melodic parts much better than you’d expect a group with such musical schizophrenia to be able to.  If this band wrote one actual song, they could be huge.

– Chuck DelRoss