Between The Buried And Me: The Silent Circus

At first listen Between The Buried And Me sound like your typical death metal band: a torrent of unrelenting sonic depravity and bile-gargling grunts. And to be honest you think you’ve got them sussed. I mean, after three minutes of the stuff in a song like ‘Ad a dglgmut’ (yes I have spelt that right) you’re not expecting things to drift too far away from their typical extreme metal bent. So, I guess thoughts of an ingenious Pumpkins-like solo drifting above some half-time heavyweight riffs is probably the furthest from your mind but somehow, somehow BTB&M pull the rug from under your feet and pull it off.

And then they bizarrely transcend into a gorgeous radio-friendly chorus whilst vocalist Tommy Rogers’ voice croons with majestic melancholia the words, “it all makes sense... we’re capable of beauty”. This immediately before he spits “Pour your glass/Rape scene scream/car crash bash/black cat splat” in the same song! Still, not as bad as “castrate the fuck/ beat the fucker to death” in a later track!

‘Reaction’ precurses this remarkable mixture of styles in much the same fashion, attempting to morph back to their brutal extremity with a little more difficulty via the sonic ambience of ‘(Shevanel Take 2)’, Rogers’ voice dripping over blurred soundscapes before his humble melodies once again make them sound like another band altogether; thus making the transition back to their death-core grunts about as subtle as a cruise missile slamming into a childrens hospital in Baghdad!

Recorded with the same producer behind Converge’s ‘Jane Doe’ (no, not Kurt Ballou but Matthew Ellard) BTB&M are about as varied as you can possibly get with an extreme metal band, and just as gloriously cathartic. You just feel that a side-project is perhaps needed for their more experimental moments.

For fans of Burst, The Red Chord and Mastodon.