BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME: The Blue Nowhere (PROGRESSIVE METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

After a four-year wait since Colors II, Between The Buried And Me finally returns with the eleventh album in a discography that has never failed to impress fans of demanding progressive metal. The real question was how the band, now reduced to a quartet, would overcome the departure of Dustie Waring. The answer lies in seventy-one minutes of a fascinating musical labyrinth where technical excellence rubs shoulders with a creative audacity that is sometimes disconcerting, but always impressive.

“The Blue Nowhere” is undoubtedly the American band's most eclectic album. Right from the start, “Things We Tell Ourselves In The Dark” sets the tone for a resolutely experimental work: a funky groove reminiscent of Prince, supported by a bass line of formidable precision, gradually gives way to a complex architecture where virtuosity is expressed without restraint. And this overflowing creative generosity does not waver throughout the album.

In fact, it is perhaps in this frenzied eclecticism that both the strength and weakness of “The Blue Nowhere” lie. Between The Buried And Me refuses to take the easy route, even if it means sometimes losing the listener, who navigates between technical death metal and dissonant piano (“Psychomanteum”), crazy waltzes and progressive rock (“Slow Paranoia”), boogie metal and rockabilly breaks (“Absent Thereafter”) and industrial metal and atmospheric rock (“God Terror”).

Yet, whether we like it or not, this extravaganza of inventiveness commands admiration. And the big innovation lies in the expanded use of strings and wind instruments. Already present in small doses in the past, saxophones, clarinets, tuba, and string quartet assert themselves here as a true sound architecture, giving certain passages an almost cinematic scope (“Absent Thereafter,” “Slow Paranoia”).

This enriched orchestration fundamentally transforms the band's musical palette, creating moments of striking beauty, notably on the magnificent and very modern “Beautifully Human” (which Haken would undoubtedly approve of) and on the track “The Blue Nowhere,” a pop rock track unprecedented in the band's catalog, which, with its surprising verse-chorus structure, demonstrates that Tommy Rogers and his acolytes are as skilled at restraint as they are at exuberance.

Admittedly, some will undoubtedly regret the narrative cohesion of previous concept albums, replaced here by a more impressionistic approach, consisting of “diaries, letters, and introspective thoughts,” in the words of Tommy Rogers. But even in its most disconcerting excesses, “The Blue Nowhere” displays a rare artistic sincerity. It takes time to get used to it, to let it settle, to understand its internal logic. But once that work is done, this spectacular album reveals its hidden treasures and confirms that Between The Buried And Me remains one of the most daring bands on the contemporary progressive metal scene. - Official website

BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME

THE BLUE NOWHERE

INSIDEOUT MUSIC

PROGRESSIVE METAL