Reviews

Aside from a few missteps, Between The Buried And Me’s follow-up to The Silent Circus is a genuine phenomenon, a bipolar supernova which pulses grind as evenly as it pulses jazz. BTBAM (as the kids, and the booty shorts say) play a mix of hardcore, grind, a few electronic flourishes, and jazzy riffs. This mixed breed of aggressive music fluctuates wildly between styles, often within individual songs. Fronted by a genuinely talented frontman Tommy Rogers, who takes his voice from Deicide growls to Mars Volta falsettos with nary a lost step, and future guitar god Paul Waggoner, who can channel Children of Bodom or BB King with equal ease, BTBAM simply hypnotizes.
 
The opener All Bodies is almost the album’s death nell. At first it seemed a rote exercise in cheesy 80’s metal, but with a BTBAM twist. Now it is revealed as a BTBAM exercise with a cheesy 80’s twist. The difference is subtle but important. The chorus is the kind of epic metal hyperbole one might expect from a Dragonforce or Thor - ‘Keeper of the stars, I hope to never find - we are just mortal souls, left to die.”  It really pissed me off at first - ‘how could BTBAM stoop to such generic shit?’  until I realized that BTBAM was rescuing a legitimately catchy part from the dregs of 80’s metal where it had lay stagnant with no one giving it the time of day for years.
 
After that initial uncertainty, Alaska races on full bore, through the experimental grind/metal/Mars Volta touches of the title track and into the trance inducing opening riff of Selkies: The Endless Obsession the first of the albums three seven-plus minute mini opera (opus pluralized is opera).
 
Backwards Marathon might just be the best BTBAM song to date, an atmospheric groove trapped between two minute walls of grind on either side. The effect of being dropped off the side of one of these grind walls into a relaxed, melodic, almost meditative state is immense. Plus, the high note Tommy hits right before the other grind wall comes crashing down to destroy the trance is worth the price of admission alone.
 
Alaska is an album as enormous as the state, also as far removed from any current conceptualization of what can/should be done in hardcore as the state is from the contiguous forty-eight. Three instrumentals and a lack of any truly head turning lyrics are testament to Tommy Rogers’ writers block, but thankfully, the rest of BTBAM played louder, faster, and more interestingly to fill any blank spaces. The result is an adventurous album, one that will bludgeon, coo, or scream until all barriers are broken down between different musical genres and me.