Events
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To give you an idea of my initial reaction to this album, during my first listen, 1) I laughed out loud a couple times, 2) I said “wow” a few times (either out loud or in my head), and 3) I had already started writing this review before the album had even ended.
That being said, I feel it’s my responsibility to issue the following warning: This album contains a substantial amount of screaming “just for the pure black death metal nonsense effect” of it [stolen from Dan’s review of Red Album by Baroness, in reference to Opeth], and if your ears just can’t handle that sort of thing yet, you can probably find friendlier albums than this to help you make the transition. You should still at least listen to the audio clip though, so you know what you’re missing out on. Now if the preceding did not describe you, I am nearly certain that you will enjoy this album. So you don’t take this statement lightly, I’ll let it be known that it’s very rare for me to make such a bold and presumptuous statement.
Between the Buried and Me belongs to the genre I’ll call ‘technical/extreme progressive death metal’. They play music which is heavy, technically demanding, highly unpredictable, fairly diverse in terms of tempos and dynamics, and extremely varied in the rhythmic and stylistic spectrums. Additionally, the songs on this album range in length from roughly two minutes to just over fourteen minutes. To properly listen to Colors, you need to play it loudly on a decent system, strap yourself in (literally), and prepare for a 64-minute full throttle musical expedition that takes you from heaven to hell and back again, with brief stops along the way at a tribal ceremony, a rodeo, and a circus. Instrumentally speaking, I consider these guys to be equally talented as Opeth across the board, although their vocalist – while a good singer – can’t touch Mikael Akerfeldt. I won’t take these comparisons any further because simply stated, this band has a different sound and a different vision than Opeth.
Colors is the type of album that you’re almost required to listen to straight through from start to end without skipping a single song, because it just flows seamlessly from one track to the next – not that you would want to skip any of these songs anyway. What’s more, it leaves you with a feeling of coming full circle because the album begins and ends with simple, yet pretty, piano solos. It’s quite clear that they conceived the concept of the album as a whole before composing the individual songs. Initially, my solitary criticism was that the screaming/singing ratio was a little higher than I would’ve liked, but after several listens I’ve reached the conclusion that they indeed got this ratio just right. My parting advice is simply to make sure that you do not pass judgment on this album too quickly; it doesn’t peak until the fifth song (out of eight).
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