Band: Between the Buried and Me | Album: The Blue Nowhere | Genre: Progressive metal | Year: 2025
From: Raleigh, USA | Label: InsideOut Music
Four years after Colors II, Between the Buried and Me has returned with their twelfth studio album, The Blue Nowhere. The band’s Bandcamp claims that this is the band’s “most […] eclectic record yet”. Now, BTBAM has a very distinct sound they normally hew pretty close to. Every album also has its own distinct foibles.
I like to go into BTBAM records blind, but after listening to this album a few times now, I can say they definitely oversold the eclecticism. This might even be their most eclectic record, if you were to crunch the numbers and see how many minutes were death metal and how many minutes were any number of other things, but this is still a BTBAM record. If you know the band, you know the sound you’re getting.
The album kicks off with some jangly guitars on “Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark”. The riffs feel somewhat chaotic, though in a carefully-planned way. It’s not necessarily typical BTBAM, but this kind of weird stuff isn’t totally alien to them. What is unusual is that the band is using it as the lead-off song; stuff like this is normally reserved for later in the album, like “The Future Is Behind Us” or “Bloom”. When they kick into the big, melodic chorus, it’s fantastic, but the verses feel like a bit of a stumble. The overall structure comes off as jumbled, as well, despite their best efforts to tie things together. I still like the song, and I need to compliment both the chorus and the bouncy build-up in the song’s final two minutes, but it’s not their most enthralling work.
“God Terror” has some electronic-influenced percussion, and parts of this song see BTBAM doing their best Nine Inch Nails impression. The vocals are often more of a harsh shout than a growl, and the guitars often buzz more than they thunder. I really like this song’s second half. The band returns to more familiar territory, but the mood is uncharacteristically lush, with some great synth tones.
“Absent Thereafter” bursts forth with exactly the kind of complex, tangled, and rapid riffs we’ve all come to expect from BTBAM. Blended in with this aggression are some lovely ethereal atmospheres that call to mind some of Dream Theater’s better slow songs. Twangy, country-tinged rock n’ roll (backed with metallic drumming) shows up as one of the band’s obligatory odd detours in the song’s midsection, and it works pretty well, overall. This passage might go on for longer than needed, but it’s still fun. Despite the good elements in this song, it doesn’t really gel, and it winds up coming off as disjointed.
“Pause” is an altogether too-long interlude that leads into the quite Devin Townsend-y opening riff of “Door #3”. This might be the most generic song in this band’s catalog, and that’s saying something. I like this band’s basic sound, and I doubt I could pick this song out of a lineup. This song is followed by another interlude, the appropriately-long “Mirador Uncoil”, which sounds like the band’s attempt to write a Danny Elfman film score piece.
As the album enters its second half, there are a pair of ten-plus-minute pieces. “Psychomanteum” doesn’t do much to stand out from other works in this band’s oeuvre, at least early on, but there are flashes of brilliance here. Some touches of that Danny Elfman-ish quality appear throughout, which is fun at times and hokey at others. The best moments are when they dip into Dream Theater-influenced melodic passages, which is a recurring theme on this album. Things finally fall into place in this song’s second half, and the band sounds like they’re firing on all cylinders, but it is disappointing it’s taken this long for BTBAM to really reach their usual heights despite playing firmly in their usual style.
“Slow Paranoia” has a slower pace than the preceding song, and the band mixes in some carnival-sounding keyboard tones and musical themes. I’m really not a fan of this sort of campy stuff. It reminds me of Diablo Swing Orchestra, and I fucking hate Diablo Swing Orchestra. The band also throws in some jazzy crooning. Combined with generic metal passages and an overall kitchen-sink feeling, this is not the band’s finest composition. Even with my hefty critiques, there are some nuggets of good music in here, especially in the second half.
The album’s title track comes next, and its opening reminds me of something off The Division Bell. It’s slow, lush, and cheesier than I would’ve expected from this band. I just do not like this. This isn’t for me. This is bland, major-key radio rock from the mid ‘90s to the mid ‘00s, and it is repetitious as hell.
The Blue Nowhere closes with “Beautifully Human”. This song’s opening is also slow and lush, but it’s much moodier than the title track, which suits BTBAM better. It’s like this song and the title track are two sides of the band trying their hand at non-metallic rock, and this song is the unquestionably stronger entry. It’s got jittery, technical playing and an exciting, dramatic arc. (And the band already tried dialing back the metal once before, to mixed results, on Coma Ecliptic.)
Though “Beautifully Human” is a strong song on its own, it doesn’t really feel like a finale. This underscores my main issue with The Blue Nowhere. For as samey as BTBAM’s music can be, their records always have a clear dramatic arc to them. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, with plenty of detours to keep things interesting. This record lacks such overarching cohesion. Many of the songs feel scattershot, and their ordering doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense. This finally clicked for me after recently listening to The Parallax II, my favorite album of theirs and possibly my favorite record of the 2010s, for the umpteenth time. That record, Colors, The Great Misdirect, and even their slightly shakier albums Coma Ecliptic, Automata, and Colors II are smartly structured in a way that feels incredibly natural and enthralling.
The Blue Nowhere is a muddled, somewhat disappointing record. I still enjoyed it overall, but the listening experience gave me the impression of a band acutely aware of the criticism that all their music sounds the same. Rather than embracing that, like many other major bands in this sphere (Dream Theater, Amplifier, and Cardiacs, just to name a few I’ve reviewed this year alone), this album saw them somewhat clumsily shoehorning other styles in. Few examples of this strategy were particularly successful, and it led to many songs having disjointed structures that didn’t make sense. I’m hoping that for their next record they’re better able to synthesize their desire to diversify their sound without sacrificing coherence.
Score: 70/100
The Elite Extremophile 