On paper, this should be the stupidest, lamest album ever created. I mean, come on. These guys hit every single branch of the irrelevance tree during their fall from grace over the past few years. And as they say, the higher you are, the harder you fall. 2007’s Colors propelled this band from progressive metalcore savants to all out gods in the eyes of some people (admittedly, myself included). I once described this album to a friend as ‘better than Lateralus‘, a notion that I’m not entirely willing to reject even to this day. Colors was the album us kids thought could finally be considered as classic as all the other records which we had missed. Their entire career seemed to be leading up to the complexity and grandiosity that Colors managed to achieve, and its liberal genre-hopping became cemented as a trademark, for better or for worse. What made Colors so great was how perilous close it tread the line between awesome and completely ridiculous. It came pretty close to tipping over into outright stupidity at times (re: the fucking HOEDOWN at the end of “Ants of the Sky”), but they always managed to pull it off with worthwhile songwriting and brutality that still somehow sounded fresh, even after seven years in the game.

 

I hate that I have to make this comparison, but after Colors came out, BTBAM pulled a seeeerious Green Day. On October 27th 2009, The Great Misdirect was released, and historians will probably note that day as the day that progressive metalcore died. In every way possible, the album felt stagnant. It was a complete retread, sonically and structurally, of Colors, and the lack of inspiration shows in every note of the album. Sure, there were some cool parts every now and then, but nothing nearly as memorable as anything in their past work. Everything sounded forced, which resulted in very limp heavy sections and pathetic ‘experiments in genre’ that were clearly the results of a band trying way too hard. BTBAM jumped the shark, and in such a bad way that it put the rest of their previous work in a really weird, negative light…for me, anyways. I couldn’t listen to them for like two years. It just all sounded really dumb. In 2011, when BTBAM announced they were released an EP called The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues, I laughed for the better part of the day in between fits of vomiting. The music of the EP was harder to digest than the title, if you can believe it. Same old shit. How had a band that had once been at the forefront of innovation, the saviors of prog metal for our generation, gotten so fucking lame? Or was it us that had changed? Maybe the world had moved on from a time where guttural screams and acoustic soundscapes could live in harmony. Actually, no, fuck that. These albums sucked, and it really felt like BTBAM had taken the whole genre down with them.

I couldn’t tell you why I bothered listening to Parallax II in the first place. Maybe I just have problems letting things go (ask any of my ex’s) and I just wasn’t ready to accept that BTBAM were as bad as they’d become. Maybe I’m just an extreme masochist. Whatever the reason, when this album leaked, it somehow found itself on my computer and I somehow ended up listening to it. And then something weird happened: I actually got really into it. Worried that I just had such low expectations for the album that mediocrity was passing as genius, I listened to it again. And again…and again. I had to make sure, you know? I wasn’t about to have my heart broken by this band all over again. So, roughly 30 listens into this album, I feel like its safe to say this: ladies and gentlemen, not only have BTBAM redeemed the past 3 years or so of bullshit, they’ve somehow managed to completely defy the odds and create the greatest work of their career so far.

The most astounding part about how good this album is that it’s technically still a retread of the past two albums. You still have your album long concept, 10+ minute tracks, and recurring themes, except this time around it just seems to work again. You can tell the band knew this was kind of a make or break moment for them, so you have to hand it to them for having the balls to not change up the formula when that would’ve been the easiest way to appease people. A large portion of why this album works is due to its flow. The problem with metal, and more specifically genre-hopping in metal, is that your songs end up sounding like a bunch of parts arbitrarily stuck together. That was a massive problem with The Great Misdirect and I’m assuming The Parallax (I only listened to it like once – sue me). Even if these parts are cool, if they’re just kinda suspended in the middle of this 12 minute long song with no real context, it really deflates their impact. Parallax II jumps all over the place, sure, but everything that happens – even the three and a half minute Patton-esque freak out that is “Bloom” seems connected with everything else on the album. The story of the album is a journey, and the music travels along with it. The album also succeeds due to the truly astounding production by Jamie King. This band gets jokingly referred to as NASA-core, and for the first time, they’ve managed to actual make this sound like a viable genre. During the ambient sections of the album, the different instruments sound like there are millions of miles between them (see Parallax), and the heavy sections carry with them an almost cosmic weight – check out the opening of “Lay Your Ghosts To Rest”. Tommy’s vocals are brutal in an extraterrestrial way, containing the power of fiery, gigantic meteorites instead of just plain ol’ human aggression. I don’t know the actual story of this album, and I’m honestly not even really sure that I want to know, but there’s no denying that listening to this album is like strapping yourself in for a journey across the galaxy, and every member of the band is playing and singing so hard that the stakes are obviously very high – both within the context of the story and for the band themselves. It all comes together on the last two proper songs of the album, “Melting City” and “Silent Flight Parliament”, two songs that blow away everything else the band has ever created. The 25 minutes that these songs encompass are some of the most engrossing minutes in modern heavy music, maybe even music in general. Twenty five minutes seems like a long time, but never once do these tracks drag on or feel as long as they are. These guys do epic like no one else, and if you aren’t on your chair singing along to the ‘jet propulsion disengage…’ coda of the latter track, I officially declare you as inhuman as the subjects of these songs are. The album ends with a guitar solo that eventually stretches out into the ambience that signifies the end of the journey, and it really does feel like touching back down on Earth. But any true astronaut can’t be confined for long, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself pressing ‘play’ and launching yourself back into the strange, beautiful, and often dangerous universe Between the Buried and Me have created. Rest easy folks, because the kings are back.

Editors Note: Watch this episode of BTBAM on bus invaders… So funny!