With Colors, BtBaM melts your face like a delicious snow cone. Tasty.

January 28, 2008 · Print This Article

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North Carolina metal group Between the Buried and Me describes their latest album, Colors, as “adult contemporary progressive death metal”. My description is much simpler – simply remove all the buzzwords and you end up with “metal”. Though they’re often lauded for their ability to incorporate many musical styles, both metal and otherwise, and shift from one to another, the band’s at their best when they’re hammering away at the eardrums like a serial killer at a Whack-a-Mole machine.

This is definitely a metal fan’s metal album, since it’s easy to pick out specific influences from Between the Buried and Me’s music. There’s a little Slayer here, a little Pantera there, maybe a smidgen of oldschool Metallica if you listen hard enough. By combining the sounds of many of history’s greatest metal bands, Between the Buried and Me ends up producing a sound of their very own that stands out from the rest.

The best track on Colors is the third, “Informal Gluttony”, though that’s not saying much considering the high quality of the album as a whole. “Informal Gluttony” is simply the best of a good lot, since it manages to showcase the band’s technical skill. This track combines a powerful Egyptian-inspired underlying riff with some of the best hardcore percussion work and vocals out there, bringing to mind groups like Dream Theater and Rain Fell Within.

It wouldn’t be saying much to commend one song on an album if the rest of the album was terrible, however, as is the case with the vast majority of mainstream music today. Fortunately that doesn’t happen here – the rest of Colors is nearly as great as “Informal Gluttony”, but none of them are eclipsed by it; they’re all good songs in their own right.

“Sun of Nothing”, for instance, immediately follows “Informal Gluttony” and provides a more traditional metal experience, launching straight into guitar-shredding from the beginning and refusing to let up until the end. In other words, it’s exactly what fans expect out of a good metal track. “White Walls”, the closer, is fourteen minutes of heavy goodness, like a statue of Roseanne Barr made out of chocolate, so awesome I was unable to come up with a better analogy for it.

That’s actually the best way to describe Colors – it’s exactly what fans expect out of a good metal album. Metalheads know that a good metal album both sticks to the fundamentals and mixes in some variety, and Colors pulls off both with…well, flying colors.

Cory