Between the Buried and Me - Automata II

The second half of the band’s supposed concept album surrounding a narrative about a main character disillusioned with his choice to allow a televising company to broadcast his dreams (according to the band’s interviews). Like the first installment, the narrative is hard to discern without prior knowledge from outside the lyric sheet, and the band mostly play a pretty predictable brand of progressive metal with slight death metal flair. I’d say, fortunately, that the performances seem somewhat more impassioned on this one though, Tommy Giles Rogers’ vocals in particular which sounded so robotic on the previous album, especially the growls. The overall quality is about the same on the compositional front, but this album does have the standout song between the two halves.

“The Proverbial Bellow” opens the album with an expectedly extensive Dream Theater-esque instrumental section and carries into a series of more traditionally technical death metal sections, but it’s only slightly more exciting than what landed on the first half of the album pair and just kind of jumbles a bunch of sections together for prog points. The song “Glide” that follows is a short interlude-type track that links “The Proverbial Bellow” to the album’s real shining moment.

“Voice of Trespass” is the most interesting song between the two albums, featuring a boisterous and well-used horn section throughout its sort of ragtime-inspired techdeath rocker. While the band talked up both of these new albums with such gusto, speaking of them as carrying their best and most dynamic and ambitious songs, “Voice of Trespass” is the only one that really captures what has made them good, and what makes prog interesting. The segues from section to section aren’t just done to stretch the track out to give it a sense of “progressiveness” and the sections themselves aren’t just littered with musical flair to give the illusion of eccentricity. The horns fit well into the song and the song overall forms an interesting musical arch with its jumpy piano/horn sections and its slower, beefier section provides not just senseless diversion, but well-integrated contrast. It’s the kind of song that would have stood its ground within the ranks of Colors and as a standout on any other of the band’s albums.

“The Grid” ends the album on a more overly drawn out and slower note, much of it seeming like wrapping up necessary lyrical ends of the album’s highly abstract narrative (which remains hard to interpret into the apparent narrative without supplemental information). For its nearly ten-minute length, though, the song doesn’t go too far and it feels like such a fizzling follow-up to “Voice of Trespass”, and a weak finish to this pair of albums.

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Listening to these albums separately and as one piece together has really only cemented my initial thoughts on them. The decision to split the concept/narrative between two releases for the sake of digestibility might have seemed like a gracious or thoughtful move on the band’s part, but the parts together only clock in at 68 minutes. While it’s true that longer albums risk more loss of attention due to limits of attention spans from listener to listener, there are plenty of albums much longer that keep a firm hold on many people’s attentions, including some from Between the Buried and Me themselves. Colors was about the length of these albums combined, The Great Misdirect was not much shorter. Swans’ To Be Kind is two hours long but it’s a creepy, heady, heavy thrill ride the whole time because it’s interestingly and well written. Bell Witch’s 83-minute single-song-album last year, Mirror Reaper, was a fantastic piece of funeral doom metal dripping with sorrow too rich to turn away from, and plenty of other classics like Godspeed’s Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!, Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, and Boris’ Pink all push or break the single disc limit and they manage to keep a firm grasp on listeners’ attention for their entire lengths years on. Hell, even Prurient’s noise/drone epic, Frozen Niagara Falls, has enough musical freshness to maintain an exciting 91-minute runtime. If a prog metal album can’t do that with a genre that thrives on extensive pieces and sprawling, epic compositions, perhaps its creators need to reevaluate the freshness (or staleness) of their approach. I’m just severely underwhelmed after all the hype the band drummed up for this album, and the capability I know they have (which they’ve demonstrated in the past) to do much better.