Between The Buried and Me -The Silent Circus
Victory Records

When I see subheadings or second takes as song titles on an album, I get nervous. Pointy-headed labels like that smack of nothing less than concept albums, a term that gets my back teeth to gritting like my dog when he sees the mailman (or any other human). In these troubled times, salvation isn’t gonna be found in a record based on the frontman’s bored flip through Ayn Rand (or worse, Stephen King’s The Stand) in the back seat of the tour van while on the road between Hartford and Pittsburgh. And while Raleigh, NC’s Between the Buried and Me's sophomore CD features songs with both subheads (“Lost Perfection a) Coulorophobia”) and second takes (“(Shevanel Take 2”) , the album seems to be concept-free—unless you consider the sound and feel of a five-ton engine block dropped on your head a concept. Some do. I’m just checking.

There’s much made about BTBAM’s mixing of metal and hardcore with “spacey, progressive technicality” in the press material (which also shills the disc as “the most disturbing, intriguing, beautiful, riveting, punishing, indescribable
album of 2003”—Jesus, is that possible?), but the disc is more metal than anything else—“Lost Perfection a) Coulrophobia” (which Scrabble fans should know is a fear of clowns) and “b) Anablephobia” (a persistent fear of looking up) are cut along Poison the Well/Hatebreed lines, with stuttering machine-gun guitar cutting a ragged circle under the floor of some Cannibal Corpse vocals, which brings the whole thing down into the basement with an unholy din. Keyboardist
Tommy Rogers, who’s taken over vocal duty on this disc, switches to straight-ahead hardcore yelping on “(Shevanel Take 2)” (and no, I don’t know what Shevanel is, nor what the first take sounded like), and the band takes an
eyebrow-raising offramp into Opeth territory on “Mordecai,” but for the most part, the band is serving up metal, hot and dripping with magma like minerals torn from the core of the earth.

Problem is, it’s nothing particularly new. Guitars are solid, from the blackmetal hellstorm at the end of “Destructo Spin” to the acoustic nugget in the middle of (“Shevanel Take 2”)—Paul Waggoner is a versatile player and can handle the disc's jerking-back-and-forth genre jumping. But the songs themselves are indistinguishable from each other or from the great majority of most metal and “metalcore” outfits, despite the occasional rhythm hiccup. You won’t find much that’s different between this disc or say, Avenged Sevenfold or Bleeding Through—which is good company to keep, but not if you’re selling the “most disturbing, intriguing, beautiful…” You get the picture.

There’s good intent in this disc—BTBAM are obviously trying to cut a different path, and I hoist a tankard in their direction for that—but they’ve gotta stretch a lot further than they have on this disc to accomplish that goal. Keep at it, boys.

—Paul Gaita