Between the Buried and Me – The Blue Nowhere (Review)

This is the eleventh album from Between the Buried and Me, a progressive metal band.

Every Between the Buried and Me release is An Important Event in my world. I’ve reviewed a handful, (Coma Ecliptic, Coma Ecliptic: Live, Automata I, Automata II), but nowhere their full discography. I’m very pleased to add one more to the pile now though, with The Blue Nowhere, which brings us 71 minutes of new material to obsess over.

Between the Buried and Me walk a fine line between unhinged frenzy and restrained grace, yet somehow always manage to not only stay perfectly balanced, but also wow their attentive audience with new tricks and surprises. So it is with The Blue Nowhere.

As with any Between the Buried and Me album, there’s a lot going on. As well as the standard instruments you’d expect, along the way you’ll find a wide variety of others – acoustic guitar, assorted basses, bassoon, cello, clarinet, flute, keyboards, oboe, trumpet, tuba, saxophone, sitar, viola, and violin. I’ve probably missed something, but you get the idea.

The songwriting is involved and intricate, mapping out a journey for the listener to explore at length. The songs touch on a massive array of different sounds, colours, feelings, and moods along the way. The band have always had an idiosyncratic and eclectic style, and these new songs are as remarkable as any they’ve done, more so in some ways. Ranging from blasting chaos to quirky character to vicious intensity to delicate fragility to striking theatrics, and much, much more, The Blue Nowhere leans into this multifaceted stylistic tradition heavily.

The Blue Nowhere is not an album you can claim is boring. Quite the opposite in fact; there’s an electricity that runs through this collection of songs. No matter what it’s doing at any given moment, whether calm, raging, bedazzling, or playfully dancing, The Blue Nowhere feels vibrant and alive. It’s overstimulating, but in a good way. There’s a creative mayhem at play across the tracks, and it’s a joy to listen to.

The songs are expressive, diverse, textured, and intense. Somewhere between pop and extreme metal you’ll find the songs on The Blue Nowhere living their best lives. Sometimes they’ll stray to one end of the spectrum more than the other, although frequently they inhabit multiple places along the way at once. The band layer their music with an abundance of ideas and interesting sounds, all the while remembering that there needs to be a song in there somewhere, no matter how twisted and contorted things can frequently become. In this, as always, Between the Buried and Me excel.

Well, another triumph from the increasingly eclectic Between the Buried and Me it is then. The Blue Nowhere is an overwhelming creation of atypical extremity blurred with all manner of styles and genres, and it’s a great record.

Essential listening.