Between The Buried And Me: Showing Their Colors

Colors was a very prominent record for BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME, solidifying them as a stand out progressive band that didn’t have to play by the rulebook. They’ve gone from strength to strength with records like Coma Ecliptic and the back-to-back EP’s Automata I & II. Now, they’ve taken the time to reflect and use their previous work as inspiration. We caught up with Dan Briggs about the links between their latest record Colors II and its namesake.

With Colors being such an influential record for the group, not just to a wider listenership, but to them as people, it was clearly something that merited revisiting. “It’s an interesting exercise,” Dan agrees. “We don’t go in to writing an album with any parameters. It’s not like we sectioned ourselves off from one thing or another, but we had material to reference from fourteen years ago. To have that stuff and to have the mindset of what that record was, and be able to apply that as the musicians we are now, that was kind of cool.”

As an exercise in reflection as well as a musical-based challenge, there’s clearly been some changes for BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME in the many years between these two records. “I was twenty-two years old, living out of a suitcase for the early parts of it,” Dan recounts fondly. “We were so young and everything we were doing that was outside of the box was really new to us. So the idea behind it was unlocking your brain. We all had so much different music individually, and all having such different interests, we were finding a way to bring it together. It was a fun time and it laid the groundwork for everything that came after. We grew as song writers and individual musicians. To be able to revisit that idea, with direct musical parages but have it reflect the band we are now, the way we write music and the way we see music, that was cool.”

While there are things that never change, evidently with maturity and a honing of your craft over years working together, things become more streamline. “Back then,” he reflects on the early days, “We used to write and share in smaller chunks, and we’d be building our way through the songs and it might take a few minutes to get the vibe of it and where it’s going. We write in larger chunks now. Someone might come with a larger part of the song or a skeleton of the song, or just the framework, an idea of how a song could be themed musically.”

As a record, Colors II stands as a testament to what BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME have achieved and their continuous growth as musicians and a need to explore sonically as a band. While it more than holds up as a brand-new body of work with all of the finesse of such an esteemed career, keen ears will hear the subtle call backs to that first record within this album. “A lot of them aren’t very obvious, so it’s a testament to how well someone might know the first record,” smiles Dan as he explains further. “There were quite a few direct links we could take from Ants Of The Sky. That song was the first song we wrote for Colors, and has so many fun parts and different dynamics to it, that it was a fun to play around with again. We thought, what if we take that shuffle solo section from Ants Of The Sky and just write a whole song that has that feel the whole way through, and maybe reference the original song half through it.”

The whole record is filled with the same energy that the band brought out in Colors. The sense of innovation is rife, with no two songs feeling the same. Even when there isn’t a reference to a specific previously released song, the mentality of writing melodies with a familiar vibe is interwoven into how this record came together. “Yeah, we had a section that had a bluegrass section on it in the first record,” Dan elucidates about new tracks like Prehistory. “So, the idea was, well what if we had a whole song that had that bounce and melodic energy to it? And it goes pretty off the rails, but it stays in that world, you know? That was a fun one.”

There’s a very satisfying, cyclical feeling to looking back to move forwards as BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME have done on Colors II. For a band with so many influences, nothing ever feels forced. “It’s always a very natural thing,” Dan puts it simply. “Even on the first record that was always the main thing. People might think there’s this sort of mystery to it, trying to interlace this with that, but music does whatever it wants to do!”

Colors II is out now via Sumerian Records.

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