Between the Buried and Me

Nashville’s Rocketown is a funny little place. Well, not “little”, exactly. It’s a 40,000 square foot, smoke- and alcohol-free mega-plex founded by Christian music icon Michael W. Smith and a few others in downtown Nashville as a “culturally relevant, eternally significant” place to skate, hang, and catch a show, like, say, Swedish melodeath stalwarts In Flames, American metal standard-bearers like Trivium and All That Remains, or pop-punk-slit-your-wrists poster boys AFI. Confused yet?

This, of all places, is where North Carolina’s Between the Buried and Me decided would be the ideal venue to film their first-ever DVD, hot on the heels of their rave-reviewed Colors disc. Add to the mix that there are no – count ‘em, zero – supporting acts, and the announcement that BTBAM will be playing all 64 minutes of Colors front to back, a la Dream Theater’s tour behind Metropolis, Pt. II or Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime, AND the band will play an additional set of fan-chosen songs after the first set, and one wonders if the band could have possibly set the fans’ collective expectations any higher. Either that, or one wonders exactly what someone was smoking when they planned this shindig, and why they aren’t sharing.

With this in mind, pit ninjas and prog aficionados alike filed in to an easily sold-out house on a stuffy Saturday night and took all of 5 minutes to raise chants of “BT-BAM! BT-BAM!” once everyone crawled through security. Finally, after doors being delayed by at least an hour and the show by another 30 minutes, the lights cut out and the band slowly took the stage with no words, no typical onstage banter, just a few waves to the crowd and vocalist/keyboardist Tommy Rogers diving straight into the opening piano chords of “Foam Born (a): The Backtrack”.

What happens next is hard to describe, really. Colors is over an hour of progressive, heavy music that, while firmly based in breakdown-heavy metalcore and scathing death metal, runs the gamut from the aforementioned forms of audio brutality to bass-solo fusion jazz to Egyptian-sounding tribal drums to Pink Floyd atmospherics to, um, shoot, a bluegrass break. And that’s just the highlight reel. Suffice to say that almost any band playing this kind of turn-on-a-dime music is going to have difficulty pulling it off live, especially when the bulk of the material is technically exhausting death metal, but in a truly incredible display of musicianship, BTBAM turned in a virtually flawless performance, right down to guitarist Paul Waggoner’s last sweep-picked arpeggio. With round one down, the band proceeded to take a quick siesta to recharge the batteries and punish our eardrums a second time. Excellent!

This second set, as I mentioned earlier, was composed entirely of fan-chosen songs, and the band proceeded to rip through a pummeling, cathartic medley of “Aesthetic”, “Alaska”, and fan favorite “Mordecai”. From there on, the set took some punishing turns, with the band cranking out breakdown-ready bruisers like “Shevanel Cut a Flip”, the scathingly complex “Backwards Marathon”, the Dillinger Escape Plan-ish “Ad a Dglmut”, and old-school favorite “Aspirations” before an equipment failure ground the concert to a screeching halt. Of course, this still leaves BTBAM’s calling card “Selkies: The Endless Obsession” unplayed, and fans took no fewer than 5 separate opportunities to drum up chants of “SEL-KIES! SEL-KIES!!!” while the engineers scrambled to fix the glitch and BTBAM ramps on various goofy tangents (“Hey guys, Dusty’s going to play some nu-metal!”). At this point, emotions are at a fever pitch, and when Rogers finally hit that opening keyboard riff of their 8-minute signature song, finding a fist that wasn’t furiously pumped in the air was impossible. After flawlessly cranking out the guitar solo extravaganza that is “Selkies” to the screaming applause of a crowd that’s been spoiled by 2 hours of stunningly brutal musicianship, the band respectfully declined an encore, but made a point to invite everyone up to the coffee bar to hang out and talk as they left the stage. Since at this point, yours truly had gone about 10 hours without food, it was an invitation I had to respectfully decline, but it was certainly a touching gesture and a solid indication that BTBAM’s dedication to their fans was more than talk.

All in all, the show was an absolute blast (how many shows do we go to these days that are actually fun?), an incredible display of over-the-top musicianship, and irrefutable proof that BTBAM have evolved from “Those couple guys that used to be in Prayer for Cleansing” to one of the most devastatingly precise progressive death metal bands on the scene today.

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