Between The Buried And Me And Me

I've been running my fat mouth for some time about North Carolina quintet Between The Buried And Me. Hey man -- I had every right. First of all, they reeked opening for Dillinger Escape Plan. After the show, these two haircuts convinced me, a degenerate prog metal spaz, to give their Alaska album a shot. Strike two. The third strike came somewhere between the retarded covers album and discovery that their name derives from a Counting Crows lyric. It was like breaching the bra barrier and turning up toilet paper. Used toilet paper. Stink-palmed, I surprised even myself by pronouncing BTBAM dead on arrival and avoided the shit outta Alaska's roundly heralded follow-up, Colors. Oh what a fool I've been. A stupid, stubborn, silly man.

So we hereby present this HooM! Official Big Stinky Sincere Apology to Between The Buried And Me and their face-blasting 2007 album, Colors. BTBAM joins Rainbow, Enuff Z'Nuff, NBA Basketball, the beach, pot, and more in the HooM! Hall Of Contrition. 

We apologize. There.

So what happened: Metal dudes were telling me to check out Canadian prog-emoists Protest The Hero, who also found wholy justified patronage at Metal Sucks. PTH's new album, Fortress, is rad, I happily reported to Metal dudes. It was at this point that one Metal dude, while the others politely drifted away, told me in privacy that I was to stop being a dickmouth and get the goddamn fucking Between The Buried And Me album 'cause, as everybody knows, it is brilliant if I'd just unfuck myself for a minute. 

Which brings us to today, the day I heard Colors for the fourth time. About six gajillion prog-metal records have come out since 1993, but Colors excels in tone and pace at a level unattained since Atheist and Unquestionable Presence. Also like Unquestionable Presence, the fourth album by Between The Buried And Me strikes heavily and is arrestingly beautiful. But similarities halt there: Whereas Atheist defined boldness as uncloseted jazzletes/public potheads, BTBAM exists in a hyper-evolved musical climate that affords brave bands a needed measure of credibility to get all weird with disparate styles, and where guitars don't just play blinding, they play blindingly memorable mini-songs across passages neither hurried nor excessive in pace. That sentence was long as shit. Sorry.

Between The Buried And Me's Colors, the opposite of crappy