Editor’s note: We’re bringing back our good friend Ed this week, because no one else here argues prog like these two nerds:

Mark’s Review:

If you read my bio, you’ll find that I’m that metal guy that’s into prog. If it’s technical, complex and musically advanced, I’m a fan, and although I’m quite immersed with the new Transatlantic, if you add a heavy component to it, then I’m all in. So it’s a mystery to me why I’ve never been able to get into Between the Buried and Me. These guys are as technical as hell, and can pretty much dominate any style of music, but I’ve never really enjoyed any of their albums. Their last album, Colors, featured some good songs, but it took me many, many listens to wrap my head around it. This usually means two things: 1) This is the sign of something great and complex, or 2) This just isn’t very good to begin with. The Great Misdirect gives me that similar feeling, lots of great moments that are wasted in a song-writing style that seems to feature a public display of talent over anything else.

Recently, a reader on MetalSucks.net stated that BTBAM is “the Lebron James of music“. I can see the correlation; James is an amazingly flexible athlete that can fine-tune his game between power and finesse to overpower anyone on the court. And just as he can seemingly perform anything humanly possible in order to win basketball games, BTBAM has the same level of talent in the musical realm, jumping through different genres and tempos with ease. The difference is that while James doesn’t feel like he has to use ALL the moves in his arsenal every time he touches the ball, every BTBAM song plows through riffs and song passages like a 2-year old does toilet paper. Almost every song on The Great Misdirect is jam-packed with a schizophrenic number of time changes, riffs, breakdowns and almost nothing resembling a song structure. While many will feel that this isn’t needed in the prog world, the songs get a bit tiresome and boring when you feel like they are just constantly changing themes for almost ten minutes with no payoff in sight. Tracks such as Obfuscation start off strong, but quickly degenerate into a chaotic and confusing pool of notes. It’s a shame, because that song, as well as Swim to the Moon and Fossil Genera feature some truly inspired and signature moments (although Fossil’s calliope-intro conjures a few chuckles and thoughts of bad Umphrey’s McGee). It doesn’t help when I’ve never been a fan of Tommy Rogers’ vocals, which I feel are forced when growling, and not technically sound when singing. Regardless, after sitting through four epic songs and two tracks that basically serve as intros, the album leaves me with feelings of both utter admiration and extreme confusion.

Maybe I’m the wrong type of prog fan to truly enjoy The Great Misdirect. As we’ve seen with the rise in popularity of other Victory bands as well as iwrestledabearonce and The Human Abstract, the current trend in technical music is to mash as many riffs and parts into a song as possible. You can say that this is a rebellion against standard song-writing structure, pushing the boundaries of what is “progressive”, or a commentary on the media over-saturation of American youth. No one denies that BTBAM are a group of very talented individuals, but after listening to almost an hour of attention-deficit inducing songs, I have a hard time really getting into their music.

Mark’s Rating:

King says: “Between the Buried and Meh”

Ed’s Review:

When a band advances so far into the expansive and sometimes flamboyant world of progressive metal, they’d better be damn good at it or else face a sea of snobbery from the mighty subculture of geeks that live & breathe this type of music (as Mark can confirm, just stand in line and eavesdrop a bit on your way in to a Dream Theater concert and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about). What’s interesting about Between The Buried and Me is that they didn’t always play material so diverse or detailed as on their new opus “The Great Misdirect” – their roots are actually based in precision-oriented thrash and grindcore music, which makes it an odd pleasure to see a band move so far outside of the hardcore box without getting completely hung out to dry by their old-school fanbase (that is, if you consider 2002 “old-school”).

“The Great Misdirect” is BTBAM’s latest effort to explain the cosmos in just under an hour, and they have pulled out every damn trick in the book and then some. The band has always favored marathon session song structures elevated to dizzying technical heights, often intentionally confusing the listener with several peaks and valleys, sometimes going as far as to expand a single riff to so many variations it could easily send the Dillinger Escape Plan running for the nearest box of tissues. So it should be no surprise the band has taken this formula one step further on “The Great Misdirect” for better or for worse. BTBAM have never necessarily been the sum of their parts – simply put… with this band, it’s actually the parts that either strike or don’t.

I absolutely adore the opening track “Mirrors” with it’s free gliding clean guitars, part jazz and part space rock, and I’m even hearing some mid-90’s indie/emo touches here – a hell of a way to draw in listeners during the first five minutes of an opus. Obviously things change immediately, taking a quick turn for the extreme and pretty much staying there for the rest of the album. “Obfuscation” features the band’s usual pummeling grind metal mixed with a chanting chorus that contains none other than a bit of Dragonforce-esque riffage (yikes) and a fantastic drum/bass/lead breakdown just after the five minute mark that sounds like a hyperactive King Crimson mixed with The Mars Volta back when they were on a lot of drugs. Thankfully the band avoids using the polka gimmick as much as on their previous album “Colors“, instead favoring more airy, layered, psychedelic passages during their mellower moments that have more in common with Porcupine Tree and Katatonia than Mr. Bungle. A great example of this is “Disease, Injury, Madness” where vocalist Tommy Rogers layers several clean vocal tracks to achieve a psychedelic wonderment that would make prog gurus like Adrian Belew and Steven Wilson quite proud. “Desert of Song” returns briefly to the swingy, carnival-style polka the band likes to experiment with (a bit useless in my opinion… Mike Patton did it a lot better 10-15 years ago) which leads the band directly into smashing out the final 18-minute epic “Swim to the Moon“.
Although I love the Don Caballero-style intro and the next few space metal sections, the track quickly falls into a plethora of jam sessions pieced together (smells like Dream Theater) and even going as far as to include a brief drum solo (???). So yeah, the band lost me there. With that being said, the guitarists do a phenomenal job throughout the album, and although I think vocalist Tommy Rogers has a slightly generic “death growl” voice, I think there is a lot to be admired about his clean vocals and I actually look forward to hearing more of them in the future.

The songs on “The Great Misdirect” are well-executed for sure, but could they be considered cohesive and genuinely well written? It’s debatable to say the least. I’d prefer to say there are several “sections” of these songs that are impressive, if not downright mind-blowing. But to call this an “album”, or anything other than a long string of brainy sections glued together, is probably an overstatement. But I think few could argue that this is a very enjoyable listen nonetheless.

Ed’s Rating:

King says: “Between the Buried and MORE COWBELL!!!”

Have A Listen:

Between the Buried and Me – Obfuscation:

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