Between the Buried and Dog Eat Dog

Browsing through the music sections of the local charity shops last weekend, as one often does, I stumbled across a copy of Pantera's Far Beyond Driven. The strange thing about this wasn't so much that it was sitting alongside Jonny Mathis and Bananarama in a provincial Cancer Research outlet; it was that someone had decided to be rid of it in the first place. Resisting the temptation to interrogate the aged volunteer about who this clearly disturbed individual was, I purchased my Dog Eat Dog No Fronts CD single and left. Some people have no taste.

The latest release from Between the Buried and Me, The Parallax II: Future Sequence, landed in Metal Harmony HQ this week. I'm relatively new to this mob, having only really heard the last two albums but The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues was pure class. As often mentioned in these hallowed wafflings I'm by no means an expert on the prog side of anything. Throw on some Opeth or Dream Theater and I'll stare at you blank faced. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I prefer my music to smack me repeatedly in the face with a brick before drinking my beer and leaving, as opposed to taking me on a whimsical journey in to the subconscience.

Hypersleep Dialogues managed to keep my attention despite the completely insane song structures and ridiculously long soundscapes but Future Sequences is bloody hard work. Thomas Giles, the genius behind BTBAM is quite clearly insane but this elbow-licking madness may have just taken the latest album too far. Perhaps I need to sit in a dark room with a bottle of absinthe to make any sense of it. I think I like the album but I don't know yet; I had to switch off yesterday and revert to As I Lay Dying for some easy listening.

So with that in mind, I must now plan for my weekend at the Relentless Freeze festival with the lads from The Breakfast Club on 26th/27th October, but more of that next Friday. Right now, I'm off to give Future Sequence another spin and cry in a corner.
M
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