Cliff: Today we’re talking about “Colors” by Between the Buried and Me.

Held this one in for as long as I could

Kyle: I think this was on the original list, however long we’ve been doing this, seven or eight years.

Cliff: Hmm.

Kyle: It was like pick your five favorite albums ever. And then it was like, “Oh no, we gotta get better at talking in not the stupidest way possible about music before we can even attempt that.” So we did one of mine way, way back with Rated R and I got it out of the way, and I think this has been on a short list every year since at least then, and we’ve just kept punting and I was like, “No more.

We gotta do it. It’s time to do it.” In fairness, the past couple of years it’s been stacked up in a pretty crazy month for the calendar

Cliff: Oh yeah

Kyle: by my recollection. It’s got some stiff competition. I think like it was Gang of Four maybe last year and Whatever. Cliff, is this your number one favorite album of all time?

Cliff: no, but partially because the amount that I love records by this band is distributed and therefore diluted across like two-thirds of their catalog

Kyle: Cliff, is this your favorite musical artist?

Cliff: Yeah, living. Yeah, for sure. Living and active, yeah. I have seen them 30 plus times

Kyle: It’s one of the few artists I know that you’ve flown out of state to see for a sonically disappointing, not because of the band, show in New York because of the, because the venue sounded like s**t. Was that them and Meshuggah?

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: Yeah. Well, it’s like your dream bill,

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: then it’s, it sounded terrible at the Best Buy Theater, was it?

Cliff: Yeah. At, at what is the longest concert hall in all of modern history. It’s like a hot dog in

Kyle: The back rooms.

Cliff: Yeah. It– I mean, you had a near sound delay two-thirds of the way back,

Kyle: That’s crazy.

Cliff: which you can tell when Meshuggah is playing because they has the lights that go with the sounds and you’re like, “Are we on a…

Excuse me, are we on a delay in case something happens?”

Kyle: Yeah, it messes you up double.

Cliff: Yes

Kyle: But we have seen them a bunch of times where everything has come together and they’ve been really, really, really, really good. And I think we counted in the two-year period around this record, like post-Alaska, pre-Great Misdirect, I think in an, in an exactly two-year period, December 2006 to December 2008, we saw them six times

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: Which is like, now thinking about how much harder it is for bands, especially smaller bands to tour, like what a luxury that would be. I think The only other band that I’ve even remotely approached that level or frequency with is Every Time I Die, ’cause they were in Atlanta reliably like twice a year there for the better part of a decade. I just don’t see anybody burning down the road. not, no band’s fault.

It’s not economically or logistically feasible anymore. So for one, before we get into anything musical about this band, I just wanna appreciate that we got to appreciate them so much. we got so much of this band in our face. And like, after really hardcore listening to this record for the most that I’ve listened to it in 15 plus years easy, this would be nigh on impossible for me to play three or four nights in a row, let alone like 150 to 200 nights a year like they were doing.

It’s hard. But they clearly love it because they’ve continued to play increasingly complex and sophisticated music for 20… Are they a 25 year band now? Yeah, they were like right around the turn of the century when they got started.

Cliff: Yep, this would be year 26, uh, with Tommy and Paul being the, I think, or- original.

Kyle: the core. Yeah. Most of these guys fell in around Alaska, right?

Cliff: Yeah. “Alaska” was the first record with,

Kyle: Blake and Dan

Cliff: Drums, guitar, and bass, and Dusty. Yeah

Kyle: And Dusty, RIP sweep right on past that and keep on going to the music. Five guys from North Carolina in North Carolina, five mostly vegan guys get together and make smart songs about, croakies and qu- and bicycles and

Cliff: I’ll just say as I follow your lead and you’ve brushed a thing away, uh, with the RIP joke, we’ll just say these days the homies all seem okay, so we’re gonna treat it like the homies are all okay, and that’s all that needs to be done there

Kyle: listen, once an episode just about there’s a, like, capital T thing we need to– we would need to take a stance on, you know? Like, there’s some sort of land acknowledgement thing to do every episode, and it’s like, I don’t know.

Cliff: Right

Kyle: I have an opinion about the principle of the thing we would be talking about, but I j- like, I can throw my hands up every time and be like, “It’s complicated.”

Marvin Gaye was the inflection point for that for me. he was a complicated f**king dude. He did a lot of things that I really super did not like. His dad shot him in cold blood. Here we are. “I Want You” is an incredible, unimpeachable album. I would like to focus on that.

Like, let’s save all the other stuff for the bar. I will happily get into it. This– We will never be two dudes who are like, “We’re not political. Music, there’s no place for politics in music.” Yes, the f**k there is always,

Cliff: That’s right.

Kyle: always. But there’s a 64-minute opus at hand to be discussed, and I would not like to detract it with the very human imperfect things that very human imperfect people do.

I don’t know. I guess TLDR, it’s none of my f**king business. this artifact exists, and let’s focus on that. Long enough wind up for you now? Now, n- now I bet you wish we had glossed over it.

Cliff: You know, that’s what I was just saying to you, Kyle, before we started this episode,

Kyle: wish this guy would shut the f**k up. This is gonna be fine. This is one of my favorite albums and, um, I’m feeling no pressure or weirdness to get it right. So why don’t we just let Kyle totally f**k it up right off the rip? Take it away. Cl- make me a bicycle clown.

Cliff: To be…

Kyle: Bicycle.

Cliff: Yeah, thanks for that placeholder. Yeah, we gotta remember to bring that in too

Kyle: As we get into the anatomy of Between the Buried and Me

Cliff: Yes. Honestly though, the 20% f**k around attitude is the only way to get what’s happening on this record. If you go too serious about any of this and treat it like it’s a f**king actual jazz record, you’ll miss some of what’s fun here. And I think the way that they talked about making this record, both at the time and in retrospect, points to that.

The lyrics are sort of about that. I think everyone else is a f**king square, so we’re gonna do this instead. I’m literally talking about myself right now in the song lyrics, is sort of like their whole vibe here. So like there’s a lot of that energy, but I think it’s good to come right out with don’t take it too seriously because as we now get to experience, going back and reading what people say the first time or first few times they listen to a record and try to review it is an incredible exercise.

And one of the things I witnessed here, which I bet almost all of these folks would write differently about it now, is if i-i- in trying to

Kyle: Hello, Nick from Lambgoat or whatever

Cliff: yep. Li- in several others, like in trying to take all this in, there was this like sensory overload type thing that became, “Oh, this is f**king silly and random.”

Like it’s

technical metal

Kyle: so random

Cliff: Yeah. maybe as much as any music on planet Earth, if this feels random to you, we’re not the same

on the inside.

Kyle: Yeah, no- nothing could possibly make more sense to me as a person whose n- neurons were connecting when he had an iPod with a shuffle feature.

Cliff: Yes

Kyle: Like, music doesn’t sound like this in your brain? I’m just glad they sorted it out in a linear fashion, because normally it’s these three things stacked on top of each other happening at the same time.

Cliff: So starting with all descriptions of why this matches up with brains like ours maybe. Okay, so released on Victory Records September 18th, 2007. I listened to this album for the first time on September 18th, 2007, which I will talk about in specifics ’cause it’s important to me. But this album was written as a single continuous 64-minute piece of music split into eight tracks.

Like already we’re making jokes about this music makes sense to me. Like to me, that maybe all music should work this way.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: the shape of the thing is already so appealing. It’s the oddly satisfying subreddit for my brain in a musical conceptual form, from five vegan dudes from North Carolina

Kyle: It has so many like Fibonacci-an qualities. Like the– Just everything just feels like the golden ratio when, when you’re experiencing it. This is their fourth record by this point. We had the self-titled and then “Silent Circus,” which I remember a lot of, obviously “Alaska” was like the record. I remember at Tyler Battle’s house, they just like had it on in the living room, and it was like, “Hold on.

It’s like 3:00 in the afternoon. What the f**k is this?” Absolutely, this is flag on the play. but then I sat there for five minutes and was like, “This– What is this again? This is insane.” And then I went to Criminal and I bought it like on the trip home.

Cliff: I did not know this

Kyle: yeah, because specifically because whoever’s CD it was, maybe Tom Kilgore’s, showed me the cover and it just like, it was just the word, just the word Alaska on the wood texture or whatever, and I was like, “That looks sick.

I need to know more. This is different than anything I listen to. I need to know more about this.” So, yeah, I went to Criminal Records back when they were in the small location, and on CD I bought, not necessarily proud or not proud of this, “Alaska” by Between the Buried and Me, “I’ll Take Care of You,” the covers record by Mark Lanegan, still great, and “High as Hell” by the band Nashville Pussy.

Cliff: Two for three is not bad.

Kyle: listen, that’s a great… If you want just like this, the trashiest AC/DC sound and s- just it’s, it’s unforgivable stuff, but, they had riffs. so we were all on that train in 2005, ‘6, you know, when we were 18. and then there was a lot of driving around, playing, especially the first half.

I remember a lot of Mordecai as we were playing pass the iPod, driving around in the car. Very, very loud Mordecai. and then this came out. So where were you? why does it stick so specifically in your mind?

Cliff: Where were you?

Kyle: It did come out in mid-September, so tread lightly. Tread lightly

Cliff: to get to your actual question and moment in time, it’s cool to step back ’cause you just told me some things I didn’t know, and I caused some of what just happened, and I didn’t ever know that before. So to answer your question about the two records before this, I went to college. We both went to college.

for one year, both of us were in college at the same

Kyle: That was a thing we shared for a bl- a brief fleeting moment. And for anyone to know us now and how much smarter than me you are, it really says something about the return on American education, higher education Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. You’re smarter than me, so you can do a whole thing around that inference train. Anyway, that’s not what we’re here to talk about. You were in college for, you were in college for four seconds, and while you were in college, blank. Take it away, Cliff.

Cliff: So, okay. As soon as I started, which would’ve been like right, I guess early September or whatever it would’ve been back then, right? I remember where I was I’m at a school event.

Kyle: In Murfreesboro.

Cliff: So this is in Cleveland, Georgia, at a small private Baptist

Kyle: Oh. Oh,

Cliff: Christian school, which, which shan’t be f**king named.

Kyle: That was rough. That was rough sledding for

Cliff: the,

Kyle: That was, like, not something you were excited

Cliff: We all need our stepping stones, and it got me exactly where I wanted to go.

Kyle: Yeah, yeah. You impressed a lot of people with the Maylene and the Sons of Disaster debut record in your dorm, by my recollection

Cliff: Well, they did play the gymnasium just down the street

Kyle: Did they really? In Cleveland?

Cliff: yeah. Like a basketball court.

Kyle: That’s super, that super rips.

Cliff: It was so good. The lights were on. It was deeply incredible

Kyle: that is one thing that, It wasn’t, it’s not even nostalgia, but there really was like a moment happening of so much crazy music out of the South and just like around the scene. Just, I got put back in the old masquerade so much, looking at all the stuff that was coming ar- out around this time.

Like we– I, I kind of took it for granted as a very fertile and interesting time.

Cliff: Oh, for sure. For sure. to that point, so right before “Alaska” came out or right when it was coming out, I guess I was at a school event and I had– So that we can really set the stage. this was 2005, right? No. Yes. Okay. And so therefore, there were a few haircuts that worked at the time. One of them would have been I’m growing my hair as long as it can possibly be, and so it’s this terrible shoulder-length emo-esque

Kyle: Swoopy thing.

Cliff: Yeah. Which I didn’t take too seriously, but again, stepping stones. You gotta get to long hair from where you

Kyle: Str- strangers sure did when they were talking to you. They took it real seriously

Cliff: One of the benefits of having that hair, though, was that I could put Shure E3 monitors in my ear and no one could tell at all. So I could just listen to whatever I wanted to. So I’m at a school event. I have now read about Silent Circus on Blogspot or some s**t somewhere, right?

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: So I download that record it took about two minutes before I went, “Uh, uh…”

Whatever the 2005 version of this is my whole personality now was like okay. I’m gonna go back home this weekend and I’m gonna tell everyone I know about this now ’cause there’s another record that’s coming out now, and this rips. whatever is happening here is good.” And then “Alaska” drops and to your point, kinda just like blows up in the friend group.

Everyone is playing this record, which just again, it’s one gets together to play technical death metal records anymore. What a precious, beautiful time.

Kyle: Yeah, September 6th, 2005 that came out. So right as we– The, the moment we started college.

Cliff: Exactly. So we’re starting college. I’m going back home ’cause a lot of my friends are still seniors in high school, so I’m hanging out with them. We listen to this record all the time to Alaska. That, honestly, because of how much it rewired my brain as a record and how much I’ve memorized it, it’s probably my favorite overall from “Between the Buried and Me,” but even I would agree that the next thing that they did after that was the actual game changer and then became, to your point about a lot of the music that was coming out in the mid-aughts and all the shows that were coming through The Masquerade, this went off like a nuke.

everyone I knew liked “Between the Buried and Me,” Yeah. and it was From the beginning of our lives all the way until now, there are a few pure joys that exist, and there for that moment, it was like everyone loves my favorite band and this rips. So when “Colors”

Kyle: It was like, I can’t believe a th- there is a thing this good in the world, and I can’t believe other people care

Cliff: And I mean, I’m only, 18, 19 years old, so I thought I was cynical by then. It’s like I hadn’t seen s**t. But like, yeah, even then I was like, man, w- like what a rare gift. Everyone wants to go to these shows. People will go with me. I’ll see people there that I actually wanna talk to. People will ask me about this band when they see me in other places.

Like, all this is awesome. And when “Colors” came out, I was living– I had moved back from Nashville, was living in Atlanta in a house with four other dudes. And to give a real economic framework for this, I was paying $125

per

Kyle: the Kirkwood house at point? Where– Yeah, yeah.

Cliff: yeah, to share a room with my buddy. But even then, the whole room was 250.

It– What a time.

Kyle: What a time

Cliff: What a time. We got this record the day it came out. We bought that thing, drove it straight back to our house, put it on in my friend’s stereo inside of that room, and with a total lack of irony, unseriousness, anything, we sat our asses down and we listened from the first second to the very last moment of this record, and all we did was, like, make eyes at each other when s**t would happen and go, “Oh, s**t.” so it’s hard to express, like for me, this record in particular is such a, an absolute searing memory, not only as a piece of music, but as like a very specific moment in time. This was– I was 20 years old, right? Yeah, I was 20 years old. I was about to turn 21. Like, I had just made a r- you know, who cares about this, right?

But like, empathize with me for a second, listener. Like, I had just made a lot of changes in my life and had decided to switch up a lot of s**t. and, uh, not a lot of folks were into the changes I was making necessarily. It was just like a really weird time where you need a lot of energy to try to make whatever decisions you think you need to make for yourself.

For me, I felt like I needed to make them then. I was in the middle of like beginning that uphill battle and then this. I have this record and this band, and my friends love it, and they– this band tours all the time.

And to your point earlier about like seeing them live, like The reason that I think I cemented all of this is ’cause not long after I first heard Silent Circus and then Alaska actually I stayed with you, Kyle, after this show.

I came down and saw them in Atlanta.

Kyle: With Norma Jean? That– Was it that show?

Cliff: Is that right? You know, it would’ve been 2005.

Kyle: Oh, no. So it would’ve been somebody else. The one– I– One that I did not go

Cliff: I wonder if that was the Red Chord show

Kyle: That sounds right.

Cliff: Either way, my main takeaway after listening to this band first on my iPod Color was no f**king way this is happening live. Absolutely no way. And there were bands at the time who this would sort of become a meme later with like Rings of Saturn and stuff, but like metal bands were learning to use computers, and all of a sudden people could play really fast on an album.

And then, I truly don’t know how many shows I’ve been to, but well over 500 at this point. I have seen a lot of metal bands. Most of them are bad, actively. And if they’re not bad, they have good songs that are really, really hard to reproduce because they did some cool production stuff, and it’s, like, really hard to make it all translate, right? Unless you’re, to the degree of, like, Kirk Blue that we’ve talked about, like, where it’s you’re managing the whole stage sound and everything.

Until you get to that point, guitarists were still playing with loud-ass tube amps. Like, stage volume was insane. Everything sounded really, really bad, honestly. it was an unironic treat to see a great metal band and to see someone who was playing clean and actually on time, and for there to be five dudes who were doing ripping s**t all at one time at incredible speed, and they were entirely in sync Just sort of like changed the trajectory of already what I was thinking about in my life. And as a music student, that set something off in me that created a real sense of intensity. So like I looked forward to this record

Kyle: Yeah. And this may be apocryphal at this point. I remember somebody describing them to me as Berkeley good but not Berkeley lame.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: And I was like, “Okay.

I had also forgotten that, I think I got ahold of the leak before it came out because I distinctly remember listening to it. I donated bone marrow the first day of the fall semester, and I came home and I laid on the bed so on painkillers, and that was the first time that I listened to this record, and it opens with this, psychedelic queen piano, which, like, very distinctly one of my favorite things about BTBAM to that point was “All Bodies” drops you in exactly what I envision taking the Limitless drug would feel like. I can picture my neurons lighting up when that song comes on.

Cliff: President.

Kyle: Yeah. And it just hits and your pupils dilate. And so when it starts on, like, a, a kind of Pink Floyd-type note and it builds, it kind of overwhelmed me. It made me a little emotional immediately. and I was so pumped by the, like, shot of creative energy that, after having, like, kind of an intense procedure on a Monday and still being in a decent amount of pain, I went to a Lamb of God and Hatebreed show that Friday, still on the painkillers, which got me through.

And I, like, the bandages bled through my shirt a little. I think Behemoth was also on that show maybe. It was like, it was a really intense vibe. but I rem- I was, like, buoyed. I listened to “Colors” all that week, and it was so psychedelic and intense and like, “Oh my God, music can be this,” you know?

And I’ll never forget that feeling for the rest of my li- I just remember, like, 2007 being a really pivotal musical year for me.

I’ve just always had it pinned that way. Came alive and expanded. the underground was really healthy. You know, when people talk about there being a scene, there was a great scene. There were so many cool small and mid-level bands then that were, like, to your point, touring like dogs. so it was a really rich time in that way.

But, like, There were other records that I personally gravitated more to than this record in 2007, but like when I think back to 2007 and that time in our lives, this exemplifies everything about m- what music meant to us individually and collectively, but also like where our lives were and what the, what the world kind of felt like.

And all of that came flooding back in, no pun intended, full Technicolor as I listened to this record for the first time again in a long time.

Cliff: This record’s concept and lyrics are not especially deep, and I think that that’s fine to say. But the overall point is well drawn out, man. Like, they were in a place where they are expressing, ” I see the path that drains the color, and I’m gonna go over here instead.” And, like, even if there were various graceful and less graceful attempts to express that verbally one way or the other, to your larger point, making this record and then putting it in the ears of people like us made us go, “Music can be like this.”

My relationship to music changed as a result of this band and this record and what they did, not only then but a- after that and all the music they’ve made since then. And it has… Even when I don’t necessarily love something that they’ve made, they’ve made so much music, and it always has that feeling of music can be like this.

every single song has a discrete concept of music can be like this, even all the way back to, you know, some of their earlier stuff that they may not love as much anymore. But especially this conception, of these five and eventually four people making this music together is something that I’m actually literally very grateful for.

And I’m really glad to just, like, talk about it for a bit and try to encourage some other people to give this a shot on the off chance that even one person has a moment like we had in relationship to any of this.

Kyle: Yeah. I mean, we talked about before recording, for me, the two things that I wanted to get out of this conversation that we’ve been ha- wanting to have for a long time are like, Cliff, it’s always nice to just be able to share when something was deeply personal and meaningful to you. I think other others like can get something out of the warmth of a genuine moment like that.

And I appreciate it as your friend and as somebody that was there for like every second of this. It’s been a long time and, but it, but it’s like a formative thing for us. So I like, I, I think it’s cool on that level. But the other thing is there are scores of categories of people that could be like, “This is not for me.”

Like 64-minute heavily technical opus in the vocabulary of technical progressive metal. It’s a very active, it like, it’s a super active listen. It’s most of the time not a very casual listen, you know, casual listening experience. so what’s in it for me? And I think there are a number of ways where it’s like no matter what stripe of music fan you are, I think you can find a way to lo- like the, something in this will make you love music more.

Even if you listen to it a handful of times and never come back to it. This reminded me through all of the layers of cyn- cynicism and anhedonia built up over the years, like, yeah, s**t, music can be like this. Like the human spirit is capable of this

It’s a real message in a bottle, I guess

Cliff: I wanna really accentuate what you said as the intro to whatever we’ll talk about next. This, to me, is some of the best active listening music to ever exist. this is to me, in the pantheon of really well-done jazz, not free jazz, something that has more structure,

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: jazz classical music, things that play with the idea of this note means a thing, and I’m going to introduce it to you now and then bring it back to you later, and because of how I introduced it the first time, it actually means something different the next time.

all five of them are doing what I just described in varying amounts the entire time

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: So if there’s ever been one, there have been plenty of records that will work for this, but if there’s ever been one I really wish if you are listening and you have even the smallest inkling that you could stretch in a direction that could handle something like this for a minute, try to find yourself time, like if you’ve got an airplane, a car ride, a commute, something, A long run. Yeah, sure. Any- anything where you can get at least sort of 20 minutes out of this at least, and ju- like just trust me and let your mind go blank and listen to this. Because the way that it engages you as a listener is fundamentally different than nearly every record we’ve talked about, with the exception of maybe Fela Kuti and arguably someone like John Coltrane.

But, but really like m- much more so in vein of stories are being told through extraordinarily proficient musicianship, and whether it delights you or not gets to sort of be beside the point if you’ll follow along. And for me at least, I don’t know, maybe there’s a joke to be told about listening, us listening to this at the ripe age of 19 and coming away with the feeling that it’s psychedelic.

But to me, this is incredibly tangible and tactile and in spatial, in a true active listening situation, I can trace what’s happening and listen to it differently, and it feels like a story that’s being told to me, even though, like we said, this music itself is in a sense circular and not like linear or progressive the way that most albums are.

It’s not going anywhere

Kyle: Right. Uh, so a couple of things. One, I would double down and say this is the most, like, precise, deliberate music that we’re probably going to cover. It’s as ex- as exacting and sort of surgical as anything in the oeuvre of TuneDig. I mean that in a complimentary way. And as a bit of a lore moment, if you go all the way back to episode eight and you listen to the “A Love Supreme” episode, you can hear something that Cliff has introduced t- to the group collectively, and me going, “Oh.

Oh. Oh,” about something else highly technical and complex and deliberate and spiritual in the way that it’s deliberate. And that episode, in a circular way, is only possible because this band was introduced to me a long time ago. So, like, my journey into even appreciating complex, precise things, which is not the way that I listen to or appreciate anything in the world, is strictly 100% because of Cliff’s influence.

And so if I, as somebody who actively thinks I don’t enjoy this type of active listening, really, really love this record I hope that go- one, you can trust that this is one of Cliff’s favorite things, and Cliff is extremely smart and has great taste. Great. That should be the thing of its own merit.

But as somebody who would, like, probably stand to be kind of a hater of this kind of thing, and there’s a lot of adjacencies to this type of music, like prog and stuff, where I’m like, “Nope. Peace.”

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: this is great. I agree with you that this is one of the best things ever, and it continues to light me up just as much.

I have listened to this record on repeat so many times, and, and I’ve done that for years. the other thing is, like, there may be an other end of the spectrum of TuneDig listener, like a big ears type person that is like, some of this s**t might be kinda obvious to you, some of the, the motifing and whatever.

To which I would say, “Don’t be such a nerd.” You know? I was trying to think of analogs in other domains for me, and with “The Odyssey” just having come out, I thought about Christopher Nolan and reading the discourse around “The Odyssey” and Christopher Nolan films, and there being whole schools of thought between people that are like, “This is the smartest thing that I’ve ever seen,” and it sent me down the rabbit hole to become a film lover.

it showed me the moves. He’s really good at showing some of the moves around motifs and repetition and Easter egging and all sorts of– Like, I can see the structure. it’s classical and beautiful in that way, as he can, like, reveal it to normies. There’s such an elegance to that. But then there’s film school purists that are like, “That’s a boneheaded way to do it.

Like, you can’t serve it up to them too much.” And it’s like, that’s stupid. If it makes anybody who might not have noticed before notice a thing, that, that works on every level for me. That’s wonderful. There’s always gonna be more obtuse s**t out there for you. I happen to think the way that they do everything that they execute on this record is quite smart and elegantly handled, and it didn’t start revealing itself to me for quite some time.

as somebody who doesn’t, like, play instruments, I only notice “Oh, that’s the thing from ‘Son of Nothing’ from before. Oh, they’re actually ending it on the same chord that they started it on.” so wherever you fall on that spec- like, you’re not too dumb for this record and you’re not too smart for

this record. You know what I mean? it’s a record that will make everybody better if you just don’t be an asshole about it.

Cliff: If my body wasn’t made of this record, I would just end the podcast there ’cause that’s pretty much the takeaway

Kyle: I mean, to make a challenging thing that is ostensibly for everybody that I would like go out on a limb and I would like go to people on the s- you know, the, the things where they walk up to people and they’re like, “What are you listening to right now? What do you rate that song out of 10?” And they’d sort of do the like pass it on chain.

I would Billy on the Street people with “Between the Buried and Me” and just be like, “No, ma’am, I get that you hate this right now, but like can I just send you home with a download code for it? ‘Cause I would like for you to listen to it on a different Saturday when you’re not being accosted by some man on the street telling you to listen to progressive metal.”

Cliff: Plus, if you wanna choose your own adventure, and at this point even the thought of the type of metal we’ve talked about is distasteful to you, “Viridian” is your track. You can just go there. You can just go there and appreciate them being good in all the ways we’ve already talked about without ever approaching the style of music that we’ve talked about for the most part, which is one of my favorite things about them.

They tend to throw at least one track like that onto a lot of records,

Kyle: Viridian, a deep blue-green derived from the Latin viridis, meaning youthful, vigorous, and full of life. That’s what this record is meant to make you feel. I also kept getting this image of like a BT BAM pride sticker. Like, BT, BT BAM is for everyone, and it’s just got the colors rainbow in it.

Uh, uh, what’s that website we keep talking about?

Tunedigmerch.com, tdmerch.com. Like, the, that needs to go

Cliff: The hypothetical thing we’re talking

Kyle: The hypothe- yeah, our hypothetical, bootleg merch

store. BT BAM is for everyone

Cliff: I’ve never gotten to tell anybody this. Uh, one day last year during Pride, I went somewhere where it would’ve mattered, and I wore a

Kyle: I’m sorry. There’s, there’s a story for that. I didn’t know there was gonna be a story for

Cliff: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, and I wore a color shirt that’s, uh, it’s white with a bunch of houses on it, but like it, it’s It’s got

Kyle: the rainbow.

Cliff: full rainbow across it. And someone very sincerely just looked at me and was like, “I really like your shirt. Thank you.” And I was like, “I, m- I do, I– Yes, you’re welcome.” You know? thumbs up.

Like, we’re good. I didn’t mean… Never mind. Cool. Yes. Great.

Kyle: This is an accident, but I’m not– But that doesn’t mean anything. I’m with you. It’s, yeah.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: Very… Another Cliff Seal does Larry David

Cliff: I was about to

Kyle: Cliff your Seinfeld, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Everyone should be free to do

There’s something super right with that, but that’s not why I wore this. But I love you. Have a great day

Cliff: To the larger non sequitur though, no band in existence has created more conversation from me wearing their shirt in public than this one. I’ve seen happen. that’s a statistical shift because of how many, uh, relatively speaking shirts from this band that I own and therefore wear, but nevertheless, I get great conversations no matter what.

And I’m a person who doesn’t like to talk to you in public, so that’s saying something

Kyle: Y- if you go to enough shows with band shirts on, you learn which bands have fan bases that you don’t want to engage with. I’m not going to name check any of the bad ones, but I’ve definitely worn some of their shirts over the years, and that’s been a like, “Oh, that s**t’s going to Goodwill now.” But BTN is not one of those, to the point of the sticker.

typically smart and also interesting people approach you. I’ve, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve always been like: Wow, that went, that w- that was actually quite delightful

Cliff: Yes. Pun intended this band has more Queen energy than anyone I can think of

Kyle: Oh my God

Cliff: Honestly, that is first of all, for whatever it’s worth with folks who are now interested in what we were talking about and this band, if you would like a, a rubric, it is Queen. They do say it directly and often, and ended up covering Queen.

They were playing “Bohemian Rhapsody” for a while on tour. Like this, this is a band who wants to and did think about music the way that Queen did. And in that sense, hopefully you can start to draw in a little bit of what we were talking about before with The Like. It’s serious because it’s good, but it’s not too serious because it takes itself so seriously that it can’t laugh.

It’s definitely laughing and there’s, there’s definitely a fun energy with it all. So honestly, my, my most soothing thing would be to just start doing the timestamps that Kyle told me weeks ago I needed to make sure and bring to this episode,

Kyle: There’s never been a case where it would make more sense to just walk through it

Cliff: A hundred– Oh no,

Kyle: and like, otherwise it’s just a big block of music where you have to listen five times before you’re like, “That was the thing for me.”

Cliff: Oh, yeah.

Kyle: yeah.

So th- this is like, let, let’s just prime you to hone in on some things

Cliff: And bless your heart, this will save you at least some time, uh, in the post-production of this episode instead of having to like map when I’m like, “So when it goes meedley-mee into do, do, do,” and then you having to like listen to 18-minute songs to try to find that

Kyle: Just scrub through it, yeah. Listen to Color, listen to Colors on 1.5X on 45 RPM

Cliff: Jesus. but before doing some of that and therefore trying to describe some of the music, I think… first of all, if you’re down at this point, might as well pause this podcast and go listen to it if you’ve never listened to it before, fine. If not, like trying to talk more about what it sounds like and then how they described writing this music back then I think paints a pretty cool picture that if you’d rather, and you’ve still never heard any of this stuff before, you can just kinda listen to this whole thing and take it in.

and really take whatever we’re about to share with you into a true deep active first listen, which I think will be at the very least really interesting. Probably more interesting than anything else you’ve done musically in recent memory. And if I’m wrong, I’d love to hear from you, no lie. What, what beat this other than the Rosalía record for you this

year? very long windup. I hated it. Yeah.

Kyle: Listen, we’ve given you nothing but heat this year, so like I don’t wanna hear it. Just go in any other direction. Go back to FKA Twigs. Advance forward to the Shania Twain episode once that’s out, we got something for everybody, brother, gender non-specific

Cliff: Kyle spoiled one of the later episodes that I’m pretty excited about. This, this trio of this and the next two episodes are, is just some of my favorite stuff in life. In fact, one more aside, man. I keep belly laughing to myself in preparation for this episode thinking so much out there, gestures broadly, is wrong.

And yet somewhere in my life, I’ve constructed a reality where my friend is sending me messages like, “Hey bro, you listen to that Colors record enough this week to take some notes on it?” Yeah, motherfucker, I have. Yes, I have, and I love you. And I love our friendship in this part of my life, so thank you.

Kyle: It’s

when you, when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life here at TuneDig Corp.

Cliff: Too

bad I have to

Kyle: And now, as Shania Twain famously said about “Between the Buried and Me,” let’s go, girls

Cliff: Everything here needs two to three phrases as a, like, container to describe a thing as opposed to ever being able to use a specific word or idea at one time. So similarly, even when this band was recording this record back in 2007 there were two descriptions of what this could be called. One of them was adult contemporary progressive death metal. Uh, the other one was new wave polka grunge, which is… Sure. Though, to our many points about the serious not seriousness and sort of how this exploded in the friends group at the time, one of the things that we’ll talk about later is like all the weird little interludes that they throw into music that last all of 15 seconds and then you never hear from them again, and there’s never anything like it again and whatever, and how oddly that strikes people on first listen, which it will.

But how interesting it became when they would play those interludes live and you would think it wouldn’t work or it wouldn’t be funny, and instead what I’m here telling you is this record that I’m talking to you about, people would show up ready for a hoedown because it happens in 30 seconds in one song in one part of this record.

It was a whole thing

Kyle: I mean, you fully have to wait for a 30-minute windup for it to happen for 30 seconds. Yeah, it’s, it’s waiting in line for two hours for the 60-second Batman rollercoaster ride

Cliff: but only if you had memorized the entire rollercoaster and could stand in the place where you knew it would happen in advance.

Kyle: That’s right

Cliff: the gate to be a, like, decent fan of this band was so high and everyone was just like, “Yeah, so we’re just gonna like human chain over it then and we’re all inside, yeah?”

And like, perhaps one of the last true meshes, of the nerds and the guys who wear gym shorts, uh, happened when this band was doing this record, and it was a true moment. But point being, like so many weird things happen and that’s sort of the point of it. So bringing forward especially some of the quotes again directly from them while they were recording, there is intentionality behind it being so strange in the sense that this is what this band conceptualized as their best at that moment.

And I think it’s great now, you know, almost 20 years on, listening to some of their interviews in the years since, they’ll sort of joke about this record like, “Yeah, back then we were trying to play as many notes as we possibly could at one time all the time,” and they’d sort of make fun of it.

And yet what we’ll talk about a little later as well is like, yeah, but they still love this record for sure to the degree that they made a sequel record.

Kyle: And tw- and anniversary tour on this record.

Cliff: Yeah. Like th- this is not a, a painfully tolerated nostalgia. This is, “Oh no, that was what we were doing in 2007,”

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: and everything about that feels right.

So they were saying about this record, quote “‘Colors’ was very much our attempt at a do or die statement, and we had to establish our identity and be who we really wanted to be in order to have a career. And we were writing a musi- musically conceptual, no rules, nothing left on the table record. We weren’t only going to write a record, we were going to live in it and eat, sleep, and breathe it.

We were going to push ourselves and no one was going to hear from us until we brought the album full circle and delivered it as a complete piece.” we’ve covered moments artistically in other people’s careers, you know, on this podcast talking about moments where people identified like this, “I’m about to do the thing.

buckle the f**k up. I know I’m ready. I’ve got enough space to do it. I’m about to do the thing now.” And that was this. Like, I just–

Kyle: I mean, I th- I think about voodoo when I hear things like that, where it’s like, “Peace out. You won’t see me for a while. It takes what it takes, but when we come back, we are absolutely gonna blow the doors off this thing.”

Cliff: Yeah. Although their speed to creating these records is

Kyle: No- notably faster than D’Angelo. Yeah, yeah.

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah, like when they talked about Alaska, they talked about, “We, we put that together pretty quickly.” Like, uh, y- uh, okay. You mean one of the most complex technical records that came out that entire year?

we we put them together really quickly.” Yeah, sure. Okay. So they’re trying to lock in. They literally described it as being the first record where they felt totally locked in as a band, ’cause Alaska was the first record with Blake and Dusty and Dan, like we mentioned. So, Blake on drums, Dusty on guitar, like rhythm guitar, but that really sells short what Dusty does.

Dusty is an incredible guitarist and does a lot of really cool s**t on this record, and is much more textural support. he’s got the effects. He’s creating a lot of shape behind the music. Uh, and then Dan, one of, one of the best bassists on planet Earth, just period. so that was their first record was Alaska with them, so they felt like this was the first one where they were really locked in, and they got to know each other as writing partners.

But that they, they felt like they realized that they were really working together well. But then they’re talking about their own music and, you know, it… Juxtaposing this with, you know, some of the things we brought forward from Twigs last episode in the way that people talk about their own music. this is sort of a cool defense of like, “I’ll be like King Crimson if I f**king want to. Here’s why.” and so they, they said, quote, “You know, for bands from the ’70s, it was very normal to have eight- and 11-minute songs. Nobody gave Queen s**t for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.'” Which is a cool thing to say for two reasons.

One, because objectively good example. Two, because you just compared yourself to Queen, and I f**king dig it. I love that. but then they go on to talk about like, a- and I think this is an even easier way to introduce ideas like this. They said, “There are times where we’re alternating between measures of 5/4, 7/4, and 5/8, and that can all happen within the confines of one riff.”

So I wanted to start like drawing all this out, right? They’re feeling very locked in as a band. This is what they mean to write, and already they kind of carve out, first of all, we’re doing 10-minute songs, f**k you. Second of all, we’re, we’re gonna play in weird time signatures.

And then they would go on to talk about, like Paul especially, that like when they were kids, they would write in odd time signatures to try to be weird. But now, at this point, like he was saying literally, quote, “People don’t believe us. It’s just natural. We just write music and it ends up being in some bizarre meter, and oftentimes it might even change measure to measure,” which is true.

But here’s one thing I want you to lock in on, listener, and hopefully person who didn’t appreciate this band as much as you’re going to in 30 more minutes. quote, “One thing we try to do rhythmically, and our drummer is really good at it,” understatement of the f**king year, “is to make it groove in a way that doesn’t sound like it’s an odd meter.

So not necessarily in 4/4, but a groovable odd meter. And so there are times where we’re alternating between 5/4, 7/4, and 5/8. Again, and that can all happen in the confines in, of one riff. And the real challenge is to put that all together and make it sound seamless like one solid groove.” my friends they’re building riffs out of like concrete on top of one another.

they’re building meta riffs. Like the thing that Matt Pike writes, that Jimi Hendrix writes that sounds so like monstrous as an individual, they’re like, “Okay, but what if that was like a fractal that was made of a bunch of different pieces and all the pieces inside of that were made of like tungsten?”

Kyle: Yeah. I remember reading an interview with Lamb of God in a paper magazine, ’cause I was standing in Kroger, and they were talking about the concept of riff farming that they had learned from Meshuggah, where you notated the riff and then you, like, physically lifted beats or whatever out of it and moved it around so that it changed the rhythm of it.

And I was able to, visualize Tetris blocks of just, like, play note here, and it changed the way that I thought about riffs and heard riffs forever. BT BAM does that in three dimensions, like n- not in whatever l- linear 2D sheet music. To your point about fractals, like, I can hear it, it’ll move left and then it’ll move up, and then two lines will intersect, it’s like a tesseract all the time.

Cliff: Tesseract is Too good of a way to put it. so then that’s one key piece, I think. I’m sort of building up some…

Kyle: first principles

Cliff: yeah. it’s hard for me to understand this record as a challenging one. I understand that’s weird about me, not you, royally. So what I’m trying to do is appreciate

Kyle: yeah, I, I also like what, what I was saying earlier, I don’t want us to assign a value judgment on whether it is or like, it’s not gonna go down like a pop record for sure. But there is some amazing pop stuff on it.

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: uh, it’s challenging in the sense that it’s not super easy, but, who are we to say how easy or not it might go down for you?

So like when we say something like it’s a challenging record, that’s not a reflection of you. That’s just trying to put it in contrast with a like, I can put it on w- you know, for the first time, first thing in the morning, no context, no prep, whatever, and it’ll be absolutely fine and I’ll get what I need out of it.

I think it does need a little like a m- a moment of meditation and focus before you

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: go.

Cliff: Yes. Well said. Thank you. So to that end, whether you find it challenging or not, we’ll let you decide, but one thing I think we can say relatively objectively is it is complex. And so as opposed to usually we can do things like listen to this instrument, listen to this part, focus on this. Uh, what I’m telling you, my friend, is there are five individual streams of things to listen to that go on for 64 minutes in a circle.

So that’s not gonna work for me here. So

Kyle: At the very least, it’s a very physical listen. Like trying to keep up with one, let alone multiple simultaneously things happen. It is an endurance listen for sure. It is challenging on that level. Even as somebody who really, really likes this album and has known it well for a long time, I would get back around to the like second listen and be like, “Whoa, my God, these guys are going for it.”

Cliff: Yeah. so we’re building up a little bit then of pre-muscle. We’re doing some stretches so you can take this in as best you can. So we’ve, we’ve talked about the time signatures and how they are approaching that by thinking about writing naturally feeling odd time signatures inside of a container that feels normally 4/4 a lot of the time, and then they talk about shifting that around.

So I mentioned earlier that this band does a lot of like, “Oh, here’s a thing that I’m gonna do later for you.” This is a very, very, very, very, very, very important part of listening to this band. It’s awesome. They do it inside of songs, but they’ll also do it across the album in different shapes and times, including some moments where they do them in diff- like one is a little slower than the one that happens right after that, or they spread it out, or it’s half as much, or another instrument is doing the thing.

Like if you get delight out of that sort of thing, it’s, incredible here. And so they are merging these time signatures together in a way that doesn’t feel like they’re putting them together. But the other piece of the puzzle that I think helps make more sense of it I’ve expressed like jazz and classical in terms of structure, but especially if you’re less intuitively familiar with what I would mean by that, your first place to go if this interests you, but Paul Waggoner was talking about again, how they, approach how they write here, and he said, “In the case of Pat Metheny, I just thought he wrote really good songs, and I love the structure of his music and the perspective of creating very linear soundscapes as opposed to verse-chorus, verse-chorus type songs.”

So that’s my best way of saying there are no verse-chorus, verse-chorus songs on this record. we have departed standard pop structure by an order of magnitude everywhere, no matter where you start here.

Kyle: But what I would say to a not sure person is I was thinking about if this record came out now, somebody would probably make a TikTok supercut of all the novelty parts of the record, all the non-metally stuff. That’s 1A. 1B is there is enough, 90s grunge, Smashing Pumpkins, Blind Melon, really interesting, straightforward, smart college rock type stuff.

Oh, like alternative rock, broad hand wave, that that could be… There’s like an EP’s worth of that on here where you’re like: “Wow, that could just be some band’s songs,” but then it’s woven into big, complex compositions. I say that to say, I continue to wonder, 20 years on as a fan of this band, why do I like this band and not other bands like them?

And I think it’s because of that thing, is like they just do normal people stuff , normal people stuff. They just play regular music in it just to like, “Well, we can do that, but other bands can’t do this. Watch this.” And that, keeps it fun. So there’s a fun quality with like the genre hopping or whatever, which I actually think is quite tasteful, and they get in and out.

It’s just like a spice in the d- you know, or a, a course on the menu type thing. But then they als- there’s also just like good song craft. I think about something like “Son of Nothing,” that chorus, big quotes around chorus, that, that sung refrain being an example. or like the piano chords that open and close the record, make me think of Counting Crows from whom they got their name.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: Um-

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: So that’s a like hang in there thing for me. So like if all the stuff that you’re saying is cool and I think is the reason to listen to the record. Again, it’s the, “Oh my God, I can’t believe human fingers and brains can do this.” but then there’s just like cool regular music stuff in, you know, there, there’s just like I’ve left my…

I think about like Death Grips doing the augmented reality game. It’s like I’ve left my favorite mixtape for you in this classical composition, inside a tesseract cube between dimensions. Come find it. See ya.

Cliff: I mean, this, this band did in fact release a NASA space suit branded with itself with the NASA logo.

Kyle: they did, didn’t they?

Cliff: yeah. if you take whatever the Death Grips energy is and shift it away from scary over to vegan in North Carolina on the slider,

Kyle: vegan bookstore

Cliff: yeah, you’ll get more of this. Yeah. People who like to make coffee and write riffs that scare you.

Kyle: That’s right. Daytime death grips. But the mor- morning show death grips

Cliff: Uh, something like that for sure that’s hopefully enough, I think, intro into the idea of foreshadowing and, like, musical counterpoints. They’ll do this a lot. This is what makes it interesting to actively listen to. It works different with your brain than when you’re just listening to something a little bit more casually and you lock onto, like, the sort of underlying beat, rhythm, whatever.

You c- you sort of grab the 30% of whatever you’re listening to and lock into that. That’s, like, not gonna work here. It doesn’t

Kyle: there’s not a quick like, “Oh, I get it. All right, let’s move on.”

Cliff: Right. And eventually, a treat will be if you listen to this enough, you’ll actually find the 4/4 that they keep talking about. And I think… You know, I hadn’t thought about it this way, but I, I think this is fair enough to say. We try to avoid conjecture, but I’m about to say it in a cutesy way, and I think I’m okay with it.

They want you to like this record, though.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: are plenty of bands who have written challenging things with the express intent of making you uncomfortable. for every bit of evidence that we have, that is not what was intended

Kyle: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. You can feel it. There’s a like, we want– We think everybody is capable of liking this. There’s almost an assumption. It’s a foregone conclusion. Why would anybody not like that? Why would anybody find this challenging?

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: This is self-evidently great music,

Cliff: we’ll plant Easter eggs in it for you.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: It’s beautiful To that end, there are two big chunks of thing that I’d like to relay from here on out. Kyle, I’ll look for your help in structuring where to put these two big old chunks of thing. One of them is let’s talk about songs. The other one is let’s talk about everywhere that you can go from here because I am not shy this episode about any of that.

Not least because I can just like talk about this catalog like I’m a BMW salesman on the car lot right now ready to put you in one today. I got this, dude. I practiced for this my whole life.

Kyle: What that meme the like slaps the hood. You can fit so many arpeggios in this bad boy.

Cliff: 10 blast beats per second smacks you on the ass

Kyle: okay. Well, no, n-no way to, no, no way out but through. So we’ll, we’ll see how long it’s taken when we’re there. So “Phone Born”. You start with some piano chords. I’ll just keep waiting. You’ll just keep waiting in the cold,” which is very poignant after you start it back on the second full listen. I-I’ll keep waiting for the record that I wanna hear, the music that I wanna hear.

Like, oh f**k it, I’ll go make it myself. I texted you in the lead up to this being like, “Is this just Fellini’s ‘8 1/2?’ Is that what this record– Is this a record about the nature of inspiration and being at a crossroads about what it is to express yourself as a way of existing in this world?” And you were like, ” Yeah, way to get it 19 years later, bro.” Nicely, respectfully. Yeah. Like, “Yes, I’m glad you finally get it. Welcome. BT Bambus for everyone.”

Cliff: N- well, to be fair to me, not until I Google Fellini’s “8 1/2” to make the damn sure that I knew what I, what I was talking

Kyle: You’re smart enough that I knew you would get it from context clues. Like it’s, it’s a thing about making things.

Cliff: I’m culturally adjacent

to things. I know

Kyle: yeah. Yeah, yeah. The pizza guy? Fellini’s Pizza? that kind of made it click though on “Phoneborn.”

Cliff: For sure. And first of all, just hearing you give a little play-by-play to the intro is really making me wanna do the, like, “Mystery Science Theater” version of album listening like we’ve talked about for so long. Could really crush it with this one. Just a lot of like, wait until he does this thing.”

Kyle: Oh, yeah. Do you remember, am I Mandela affecting this? They had visuals, like Crack the Sky had visuals, right? It was like old weird footage and it had the, it had a color layered over it for each section. It was like compiled footage that they played behind them. That was a thing,

Cliff: That

Kyle: right?

Cliff: that sounds right-ish. They, to be fair, it’s hard to remember. They did not– They still to this day have not really maintained a steady stage thing. They go back and forth between lots of lights and I don’t think we need these guys. But yeah, th- I think they were doing more back then for sure.

I,

Oh.

Kyle: I seem to remember them, like, releasing preview visuals or something, and then they used it on tour. Or maybe I’m, again, maybe I’m conflating that with what Mastodon did for “Crack the Skye,” which was a very similar experience, ’cause that band also went out and just played that record for, like, over a year straight.

and that was also, like, sort of a mind-exploding experience for both of us. So maybe I’m conflating the two, but I I remember– That’s how I remember it in my dreams.

Cliff: It might be that, but they also did some cool stuff for the next record after this one “The Great Misdirect.” They were doing a lot of, a lot of interesting internetty stuff back then. Which again, always a constant reminder, like whenever we’re talking about a record that’s placed, especially in this relative amount of time, you gotta at least mentally compensate for like we’re, we’re beginning the long transition into streaming from here.

Things felt different across the board and shows and tours felt different. The way we listened to music was still very different. Uh, and even though we were using the internet more and more to do it, this was sort of like the… This was the turn maybe from like PureVolume into Facebook-ish timeframe

Kyle: Well, this is maybe like the third– This is a period of time I think we avoided on the pod- may- not avoided, but just like weren’t focused on on the podcast for a long time, ’cause it was like the, you know, this is the, our heyday or whatever. This is the formative time of our youth. Why would we focus on this?

We should be more focused on discovery type stuff for ourselves. But I think this is like the third one of these now with like N.E.R.D. on the earliest end of this phenomenon and Twig sort of on the latest end of this phenomenon, where it’s like a, a v- there’s a very real lost media issue, you know, where e- even stuff in the Wayback Machine is pseudo broken, and there’s all these artifacts that got generated for things like MySpace and PureVolume that are just kind of gone now, and they ju- they just don’t exist anymore.

So it makes the time feel a little more hallucinatory, a little more free. it’s cool that there’s no panopticon into what was happening culturally at that time in some ways, but it’s also sort of sad ’cause people were doing cool and creative things.

Cliff: Yep. And to, to further place it in time, w- which thinking about this record reminded me of it, Between the Buried and Me recorded a live version of “Colors”

that, that was released in 2008, but it was recorded at Rocketown in

Kyle: Town. Ugh, f**k that place

Cliff: Which is sure. Sure, but I saw some wild bands there for

Kyle: Sure. Yeah, yeah. I saw some great shows, but also hated it.

Cliff: Including the Silver Mount Zion, which seems impossible

now. in the, in their version of purgatory, like in a little closet-esque room with 20 other

Kyle: Yeah. That’s where we saw “Every Time I Die” that one time. “Every Time I Die” and “Let

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: feel like side

Cliff: yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah

Kyle: no, we saw the first big show, big room show that I saw there was the He Is Legend show, where we were both in the “Dungeon Witch” music video

Cliff: Yep. Yes. But I remember them playing in Rocket Town, this would’ve been prior to them recording the “Colors” live version. But like, I took a person to that show and said, “I want you to watch what this guy f**king does when they play ‘Selkies.'” Because the moment that I really brought forward from the first time I saw them is like I said they played everything note for note perfect, which was outrageous in and of itself.

But then “Selkies” off the Alaska album, I mean, still to this day they play it. It’s pretty well known in the fan community a- as

Kyle: Like a

signature song.

Cliff: yeah, But he builds through this solo, one of the greatest guitar solos I’ve ever heard in my life, and builds towards where he is playing…

So he’s playing sweeps, which are already a really specifically difficult thing to do rhythmically and involves like a lot of coordination with your hands. It’s really hard to do them fast, and it was– They sort of pioneered how often this got used in metal to begin with. But he builds all the way to the end of the song, and he starts to do these sweeps which go all the way through these arpeggios, except it- when he gets to the bottom, I’m like, “This, this dude is then tapping at the same…”

He’s doing guitar techniques together that are hard to do separately at that speed, much less all coordinated together, and it was, once again, it was just music can be like this. Like, playing guitar can be like this? It’s just outrageous. and so yeah. I see why I’m unbearable to people sometimes now as we talk about this.

Anywho, so back to the first track. First of all, one of the cool things that they do is sort of repeat this approach on other records. Yes, in “Colors 2” that we’ll talk about later, it’s kinda shaped a lot like “Colors,” but also m- possibly also my favorite record from them “Parallax II” starts with this song called “Goodbye to Everything,” and it’s not piano, but it’s the same…

It’s the whole same structure of the thing, like an unsuspecting approach that runs exactly counter to how “Alaska” starts, for instance

Kyle: And it’s like a here’s your character, here’s your narrator type of situation as well. Yeah.

Cliff: What I love about this one Is that it is this cool dial that they start turning really slowly throughout this first little half song thing, and it’s just you are listening to a metal band now. N- eh, n- now. And it just cranks up and goes fast and goes fast and then drops

into the next song.

Kyle: do, do, Yeah. And then, yeah, and then speeds up into the full-blown da-da. Yeah

Cliff: And this this is some, i- if there is such a thing, if there is such a thing as metal scene inside baseball, it is this. this is before the, like, Sunbather record made black metal interesting to, like,

normie-adjacent

Kyle: the Liturgy white paper and Death Heaven Sunbather ma- made every insufferable blog asshole write a thing

Cliff: Yeah. So like, I’m not saying black metal was some special thing, unusual, uh, unlike other parts of metal or something like that, but, uh, the

Kyle: Well, it didn’t have people who dress like people from “Seinfeld” listening to it before, generally speaking

Cliff: Exactly. So thi- this song in particular basically ramps you directly into that style of music and then starts to drop in “Foam Warm B” into more of what you’re actually gonna experience from there on out. I remember two moments in this record because of remembering it the first time I ever listened to it, and, you know, you’re having that moment where you’re like, ” I told everybody about this band.

This better not suck. If this is bad, I’m gonna be really embarrassed,” And we know at this time, if a band is gonna go any direction, they’re gonna do the Avenged Sevenfold and go, “Yes, we could be good, but what if we were this instead?” And so I was really

Kyle: Gets rid of the pain of being a man I loved that s**t though. I can’t even front

Cliff: Sure.

Kyle: I mean, I– like I’m the butt rock guy of the two of us though. I think only one of us has owned a Nickelback CD before. The famous Limp Bizkit apologist, Kyle Stapleton

Cliff: As everyone else becomes so bad, Limp Bizkit’s like, “Look at us though. Haven’t done anything too wrong lately, huh?

Kyle: That’s a w- that’s a Wes thing more than anything, I feel like. John Otto

Cliff: So two moments in this song stuck out to me the very first time I ever listened to them, and they were the ones that sold me on whatever was about to happen next. One is right at about two minutes, they start doing the weird transitional things that we mentioned. But the great part about expecting them to play a thing you might need to learn about later is that when they don’t do that, it’s also interesting.

It makes you realize that you’re listening to it and that you’re, like, involved and paying attention, and it’s awesome. And so a good portion of their transitions are completely strange, foreign, never come back again, never seem to have another hook, almost come out of nowhere and start doing odd things that somehow make enough sense.

It’s like Blake, the drummer, is doing some form of the Miles Davis there’s no wrong note thing and just sort of like chasing them down the measures like, “All right, I’ll correct this

Kyle: Ba-doo-dee-da, ba-dee-doo, ba-dee-da-doo-da-da. Yeah

Cliff: It’s like, “Okay, guys, I’m gonna play 14 and a half notes here real quick, and then we’ll be back.”

Kyle: I, started seeing after a while the visual of like, a video wipe transition when they would do the like, you know, just like a next scene type thing. And I didn’t clue into it for a while, but it was just a like, yeah, let’s, uh, let’s throw some pots and pans down some stairs to move on to the next scene.

Cliff: If it helps, I think a little bit about it as like comic book panels and the way that really cool filmography will have the like, “Oh, okay, we’re gonna like kinda move things in all of a sudden and create a… Now you’re not h- you’re not just a person with a perspective on the scene. Now there are things happening.”

And to me, that’s a lot of what they kinda do. It’s like a, a thing slides in from the side and then either stays there or it’s like, “Goodbye. Never again.”

So by the time in this song that we reach 4:20, which is not intended to be a pun, it’s just like when this thing actually happens, they play this dorky ass riff breakdown thing, and I was like this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard and it’s great.”

Kyle: I called it the f**kery riff

Cliff: Yeah. Did a little, little it. it’s just so…

Kyle: So here’s my, here’s my write-up of “Decade of Statues.” pinch harmonic riff at three minutes is my first holy s**t. Uh, then they half time it, holy s**t, all caps. Then they do a short clean jazz passage. Oh my God, what a sequence. Then the quote, “F**kery dual lead passage.” Then a justification statement of all that insanity by saying the lyrics, “It’s a must these days for the colors are fading.”

we had to do all that ‘ cause otherwise life would be dull. Welcome to Colors.

Cliff: what I wish I could express to the listener in this moment is like sitting there as a person who cared about this music, I understood the lightheartedness of what was being played simply by loving this band, understanding what they were doing, and listening with intention. And it paid off the way that a f**king Christopher Nolan movie does.

I mean, this band is basically “Memento.” The fact that you figure out “Memento” ahead of time and know what’s coming doesn’t make it a bad movie.

Kyle: And to be

Cliff: a little

Kyle: when we say what they are doing, we just mean f**king going for it. All, just f- full, if Full Send were a band, that’s what’s happening. there’s no big grandiose idea other than what if we could, and then they do.

Cliff: Yeah. Right So then out of this song straight into something else that sounds completely and immediately different,

Kyle: A gong.

Cliff: right? Like a gong, a didgeridoo, a, like Egyptian feeling

Kyle: Bad” yellow filter. We’re, we’re in a foreign country now.

Cliff: It feels old and prehistoric, which is cool. it’s hard to express. Like, I’m not saying what’s happening here is like, “This is the greatest music that’s ever been invented.” But I am saying like, I connect with this so deeply. It’s so cool to me.

Kyle: It makes you feel something. Th- this specific– and “Formal Gluttony,” when this comes on, inspires your sense of wonder. Like, if you’re our age and you, as a kid, had a diet of things like “Carmen Sandiego,” you feel the bigness of the world when you hear something like this embedded in a style of music where you weren’t expecting this and it’s something else that you love.

And if I recall correctly, I read that this part of it was built around Blake had this sort of 6/8-y rhythm that he was playing around with, and they wrote around this first part. Is that right?

Cliff: And one of the other things this brought to mind for me then, so kind of building around a beat and then bringing in scales and things that feel like they’re from a time reminded me of this’ll be really fun if anyone follows this, but like Nile’s “Annihilation of the Wicked,” like technical death metal that is about Egypt in an overly serious way.

they through raw commitment to that entire concept eventually just start feeling like a band who’s somehow playing from that time period when they’re doing it well. And that combined with like the sorta background chanting of like, “Build, rebuild, cannot close our eyes,” like this is the sort of vague circular stuff that I very much enjoyed as a 20-year-old conceptually

Kyle: Dude, I will never forget as long as I live being 16 years old, umpiring a youth baseball game with you. It’s like 9:30 in the morning, and you explain to me that you have this idea for an all instrumental concept record that’s the s- the building and destruction and starting over of a civilization that starts with one slow hammer on an anvil.

Ting, ting, and then it builds up. Sorry to give your IP away, but you haven’t written the record yet, so maybe this is an impetus to do it before somebody else does. that was all I thought about that whole weekend. I drove home in silence, didn’t even listen to anything. I was like: What would that sound like?

It had just, like, never occurred to me that you could do that with music. I just thought you wrote little Sun Records, three minute, two and a half minute 45s, “Baby, I Love You,” uh, on out into oblivion. Once again, I didn’t know this is what music could be

Cliff: We got room for all of that, baby So that I don’t drag ’cause… But I could do a second-by-second. But really the meat of this record arguably, I guess, would be like the, the center two songs, so “Son of Nothing” and “Ants of the Sky.” This whole album obviously, like we’ve talked about, sort of goes together. But these are also contained within that, a, a song that was then subdivided.

I’ll give you a little trick to listen to the transition in a minute. But “Son

of Nothing” and ”

Kyle: Son of Nothing,” “Ants of the Sky,” prequel to the sequel that’s a perfect 30-minute thing that never loses you for a second. “Ants of the Sky” is one of my favorite pieces of music by anyone f**king ever, and my eyes rolled back in my skull when I re-listened to it, just like, “Oh my God, I love this so much.”

And it was the first thing they wrote or like the first thing that kinda mostly

got there. I think that it was like this notorious 14-minute demo that they supposedly had and originally were gonna maybe open the record with it. but it opens at full speed and they had to write backwards from “Ants” to whatever “Son of Nothing” ended with to get up to…

Like I remember the Josh Homme guitar moves where he was talking about like H-Hendrix or Billy Gibbons one had to like get– had to play around something to get to the signature move, the signature bend. And this is like that structurally with a song. Just like, what do you mean? It starts full speed after the one or whatever.

but yeah, “Son,” “Ants” prequel. if, you find yourself struggling on the first listen, just m- I mean maybe just start with “Ants” even ’cause you’re, it’s just gonna launch you out of a rocket and then back up to “Son.” Do “Son,” “Ants” prequel, “Son,” “Ants” prequel on a, on a loop. That’s one flavor of this. Just “White Walls” is a thing.

If you don’t like any of that you can do “Viridian.” But yeah, “So-Son of Nothing” and “Ants of the Sky” is a great one-two. The big battleships at the center of this record

Cliff: Mm. You will appreciate. If anyone at this point hasn’t realized this is why Cliff is like this, here’s one more bit of evidence. One exercise I got to do with this record was how far can I go from memory?

Kyle: Oh, s**t. On guitar?

Cliff: in my brain. On guitar it would be pretty sick. I know how lo- how to play a lot of these, but, um,

Kyle: I was like, “On drums?” ‘Cause I know you’ve been practicing drums a lot lately. Like, damn, boy

Cliff: Not that much, sir. no, just having fully all the different instruments and exactly what they’re playing memorized because I listened to this as much as I watched the movie “Toy Story” when I was a child and could recite the entire thing to you start to finish, including the Randy Newman songs.

So each time I get pretty far into “Son of Nothing,” but it’s a long one, so…

But by the time we get here, okay, so this song, quote from Tommy, the vocalist here, quote, “This song is about a man who gets tired of his life and he decides the only natural way to rid himself of this world is to fly to the sun and burn his body. He builds a rocket ship and starts his journey, and this song is about his thought process during his voyage towards death.

He evaluates all the different aspects of his life until in the end he realizes he had it better than most, and he has regret, but there’s no turning back because he’s already floating towards the sun.” Once again, this is exactly my type of s**t in 2007. Thank you very much. I feel this.

Kyle: now, by the way. More sharply than ever

Cliff: Indeed, I do feel a spaceman. That’s what they say I am. This song

Kyle: I’m my– Also, I’m my own planet. Real missed opportunity to not put that on a T-shirt.

Cliff: True

Kyle: It’s not too late

Cliff: This band has put out one bajillion T-shirts, so there’s really no excuse to not have

done it yet. I do appreciate their merch game and the ability to support them through such.

Kyle: It’s strong

Cliff: So a few key moments here to walk you through, ’cause it is, you’re getting into the longer guys now, right? First bit is like you get two minutes of pretty intense s**t, and then at two minutes they drop right back out, uh, and build up from an acoustic guitar from almost nothing.

And they start building that whole thing up again. and then by like 50 seconds later, two minutes and 50 seconds in this song is one of the greatest examples of what we’re talking about with them doing the preview thing. At two minutes and 50 seconds they do this thing. Listen to it. But then after that, there’s this like weird ass little break.

They go in this totally other direction about, 40 seconds later. They do this little la-ti-da thing in the… Tommy does this really odd singing thing, and then at three minutes and 48 seconds, they bring back the riff that I just mentioned from like a minute and a half ago, and then add something different to it, and then they’re off again.

there’s 1,000 instances of like this example that I’m trying to give you. It’s really cool. It’s neat to like chase them and listen to it, and it’s, it becomes funnier that they do the little interludes that only happen one time because it starts to feel a little bit like somebody f**king with you, like trying to send you down the wrong place in a maze or something.

Kyle: Okay, for the la-di-da part, I just copied and pasted in the Julia Louis-Dreyfus from Veep where it’s like, “Laughs nervously. What the f**k?”

Cliff: Yeah. It’s odd. and one of the greatest things about how weird it is, is like they are playing– they have been playing this song for a long time with full f**king bit commitment to all of

Kyle: Full speed, game speed.

Cliff: No apology, no “Haha, we did this

back then. Isn’t it uncool now?” N- no. which is what’s so fun about the energy of it, ’cause they’re not telling you it’s serious and artistic.

They’re just gonna do it for real, 100% of it, all of it

Kyle: There’s really something about life in, in there, right? You know, in, in the 10 minutes and 58 seconds that represents your life, the 20 seconds where you do the la-di-da thing is like, it amounts to when you take a fashion risk at an event or something. You wear a strange outfit one time and you’re like, “Well, I’d just be normal.

I’d just be regular like all the rest of you if I wore the same old black tie thing,” you know? But I, I wanted to wear the Dumb and Dumber powder blue thing to this particular gala. but also, here’s how good I look in a black tie. You know, that sort of thing.

Cliff: Yes. Couple of other bits then, I guess, at 4:43 they do… They shift into clearly like a, a major key or, or major key focus, which they do a lot. They shift between minor and major, and not in the way that, you know, a lot of times we talk about records and we’re like, “Notice this subtle shift from minor to…”

It’s not subtle when they shift from minor to major or back here.

Kyle: The whole feel changes

Cliff: yep, it feels straight different, which again, I love, and especially because I was listening to this so much when I was a music student and learning about theory. Like this is a, this is a smart, like capital S smart thing to do to move people through the music.

don’t be shy about major keys. Do it and then go away from it so it doesn’t feel like you’re doing it the whole time. And if you do it right and spread it out the right way and build it up the right way, you get this crazy payoff that comes from nothing except how the music has been feeling for 50, 60 minutes.

It’s awesome, and it’s the s**t that they teach you in school, and a lot of times it gets wrung out if a band is even trying to do it through production or whatever else, and it’s just here. major key bit there that’s heavily inspired by like… I mean, I saw one reference to this. I’m not sure this is probably the canonical reference, pun intended, but, uh, I saw a reference to Pachelbel’s Canon in D as like, “Oh, maybe they’re playing this on guitar.”

I’m not so sure that that’s true, but one thing that I do like is the idea of anyone listening to us now and then going and listening to Pachelbel’s Canon in D or anything loosely related to that, because it will tell you what I’m trying to get across to you now about major keys.

Kyle: Right.

Well, there

was that video a while back that was like everything is canon indie, you know? Like all major pop is canon indie, the Vitamin C song and all those other things like, it’s just kind of an unconscious signal to pop positivity or, or something like that. It– I mean, it’s just imbued in everybody musically, you know?

It’s a, it’s a Winter Soldier code for everybody chord-wise.

Cliff: That’s what makes it funny showing up five minutes deep in the middle of a technical progressive death metal record. It’s why I love this s**t. And then, you know, one other bit before it sort of transitions through is like around 6:46 they are full on in something resembling “Aqueous Transmission” from Incubus.

Oh, you wouldn’t believe it was the same band if you had hopped into this part of it at all. And I love how they draw that stuff out and hide it in the songs. And again, like I’m just expressing they’re playing every second of these songs live

Kyle: Yep

Cliff: And the transition is just as strange and abrupt as you would expect it to feel, and there’s something really interesting about it.

Kyle: I hadn’t thought about “Aqueous Transmission,” but my favorite part of that song, I mean, both of my favorite parts of the song are the parts where they say in some fashion, “I’m floating.”

The, but the first one is the like I’m blissfully, I’m floating farther, I’m floating farther away.” I didn’t clock that the lyrics in that part said “I did love, I did laugh, I did live.”

And when I went on Genius, I laughed out loud when I saw that part. Like, that encapsulates the BT BAM sense of humor

to me perfectly, because they absolutely mean it through the vessel of this character 100% in earnest, but it’s also like a little bit of a, ” Heh.” and then they go into like spaceman cumbia right after that part.

It’s like “Aqueous Transmission,” a little bit of weird cumbia. But to your point, they preview the, the resolution riff, the like, “I’m floating toward the sun of nothing” riff immediately before the cumbia just for like a measure. and that’s one of the places where it’s like a little more pronounced, one of the first places that I noticed where I was like, “Oh.

Oh.”

Cliff: Mm-hmm

Kyle: there’s like a large chunk of this that’s clean tone, jazzy type stuff that like you’d still have a whole cool song there if you didn’t do any of the metal things. But then you, you put the heavy and the light together and it is a, it’s a big, interesting composition at that point that becomes uniquely them.

then you have this like descending note, grunge in spirit thing in, “I’m floating towards the sun of nothing.” It’s like so sad and affecting. and they’ve talked about how they like sad-feeling stuff. The “Tears for Fears” record, that’s a concept record. They talked about like, “Oh, it didn’t occur to me,” I think Dan Briggs said, “It didn’t occur to me that like pop music could be so sad and so poppy.”

they’re fans of Counting Crows, who I think have a lot of really sad music. but they do that vibe really well.

And I think the best instance of it is, is here toward the end of “Son of Nothing.”

Cliff: Yep. So I’ll give a l- little trick, although at this point you’ll understand that this is just how the music works, but a nice bit. If you wanna hit “Ants of the Sky,” go back to 10:47 in “Son of Nothing” and then go from there. Because what they do is you get another treat of what we were talking about where they introduce the riff with only one guitar and the drums, but at a slightly slower speed and then hit “Ants of the Sky” running You get the sensation if you back up, you get the sensation of them literally, like, hitting the gas pedal and moving with the music

Kyle: Or, like backing up and getting ready to sprint full speed.

Yeah.

Cliff: a Hot Wheels car.

Kyle: Like a Hot Wheels car

Cliff: it’s sort of funny. It reminds me of, reaching out to the normies through my M-Marvel references. Uh, it’s sort of like when Iron Man and Thanos are fighting in f**king space and he does a bunch of s**t and Thanos goes, “All that for a drop of blood.” Like, they do all this so that you can have a five-second intro and then they never touch it again.

Like, it’s just that over and over and over again, piling up. So once again, in this song like we talked about in the last one, they’re they build like a rocket only for a minute, then it drops all the way back down to piano. Then they play a major recurring riff once that comes back at the end of the song.

it’s just this over and over. This is why it’s just if you like music and you can handle this, just please listen to it. You might even need to journal. You don’t have to tell anybody about it, but, like, it could be an interesting exercise for you. Or draw or, like, do sort of anything that might help you, like, get out or document the things that you’re noticing or experiencing as this music happens, ’cause there’s a lot of it, but you can follow and it’s really cool and it moves really well Couple other highlights, I guess, on this long-ass song.

But one of my favorites around 8:22, you get the– They drop into this really familiar sleep on, fly on hook

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: that, that builds really well. It sounds cool. And then around 10 minutes and 45 seconds, you get a, again, a lot of really chill music. No, absolutely no inclination of what had come before.

Really chill, downbeat type of music.

And then…

Kyle: smooth jazz at 10:45.

Cliff: solo

that’s thrown in. please, like, borrow how much I love it as a guitar player. Th- this is some of the coolest modern guitar work, and it just popped up on this album from f**king Victory Records in 2007.

It lit my s**t up. It was so great.

Kyle: Again, if there were a whole album of it, they’d be a marquee player at Big Ears next

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: in Knoxville for sure

Cliff: And all I was doing at this time was listening to Pat Metheny and Chet Atkins and, Christopher Perkins and, like, the, the literal greatest guitarists on earth. And this kind of stuff just, like, drops at my doorstep, and I love sending people back to it. so again, Paul hides some incredible stuff in there.

Then after that is the aforementioned hoedown. We get this little bluegrass thing, which to some reviewers was just distasteful.

Kyle: Unacceptable, yeah.

Cliff: The “Adventure Time” meme always comes back up for the unacceptable. I’m not defending this like it’s some brilliant piece of music.

What I am telling you, though, is that, like, it itself as a moment in music communicated what it meant to like this band. The fact that you knew that this existed in the song was, like, step number one. Step number two is even knowing that they’re playing this song to begin with, and you’re like, 12 minutes deep in it at this point.

You gotta actually know it’s coming. I’m talking about people who were wearing cowboy hats for the express reference of this moment. It was a whole

interesting… Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And like, in one sense, that goofy ass moment was exactly the same moment every show where you would go, “Oh, one of us.

Everybody here, one of us. Okay, I get it.” we all… All right. We’re all here. We all love this. Uh, uh, okay.

Kyle: I wasn’t gonna be the one to do it, but I’m not necessarily mad that you did it.

Cliff: Exactly. Second though,

and this– Yeah. So in this little breakdown in the music itself there’s a talk track over it. It sounds like you’re sort of like in a saloon or something like that. again, all of this sounds really stupid until the first time you hear them do it live, and then you go, “Oh my God, it’s every– we are– Okay, we are making the noise that sounds like the thing off of the r-” oh, and it’s just this surreal moment of like, nah, somebody thought about this and planned this, and now we’re having this sort of moment where it’s like it w- it’s a literal f**king country bluegrass moment in the middle of a long song that’s silly and feels wrong, and yet inside of all of this is e-even just for me, is like all this meaning.

this thing means something to me, and like those moments reminded me of like, well, a good portion of everybody else in this room gives a s**t about music being cool and like meaning something and people trying. And like I have found some portion of my people and like I want to do this all the time.

And like all of that came from the thing that if you just read a review about it is like, “Nah, they did this stupid f**king thing in the middle of a cool song.”

Kyle: Hmm. That’s beautiful

Cliff: And isn’t it stupid that it’s beautiful? You know?

Kyle: Yeah. And isn’t it beautiful that it’s stupid?

Cliff: yeah

Kyle: Yeah. I, at this point will reiterate that I was medicated the first time that I listened to this record, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I’m hallucinating.” the meds are getting away from me when I heard this. I didn’t think it was real. And I remember laughing so f**king loud that my mom came in the room to make sure I was okay. I vividly remember it. I really want an isolated track of just the saloon chatter, ’cause I can only catch it like in literally, “Hey man, what the heck you doing over there?” And it’s like kind of King of the Hill-y. I really want that released as its own standalone thing. I will say there is a straight– Like, normally it’s like apart, you know?

We isolate 20, 30 seconds. I will say I timestamped fully four minutes of this thing as sequence after sequence of this is what makes it, the DNA of this is what makes it one of my favorite pieces of music ever. ‘Cause it’s just like, it’s like the Vince McMahon meme, you know? They do the first thing and his, like, his face keeps getting big, bigger and more elated.

There’s like six or seven of those in a row. So I’m glad that you, kinda touched on all the other layers of the sandwich other than this part. But I think if you’ve listened to any amount of this podcast, you’ll be able to key in on like, “Oh, this is the most Kyle part of the whole record, and maybe of this band’s whole repertoire.”

So like, it starts right after two min… I mean, pretty much right away once the piano dropout happens and they start building back up, it’s all building to this big part. So like right after two minutes, at 2:10, they do what I call the, the carnival riff. and then at 2:40, after 30 seconds of that, they do the, the laser show, kind of lead part or arpeggios or whatever, the

and then about 15 seconds of that, and then they do… They’re about to do a Pantera riff, but they do like a few seconds of, of a few bars of like pre-Pantera. and then at 3:05, they hit this Pantera lick like full blast. And it gets a li… It may get a little lost in context how popular southern metal stuff was in this exact moment.

So for a band of five dudes from North Carolina, who again, on a n- on a covers record had just covered Cemetery Gates, like all of a sudden all these people playing guitar and smoking weed were realizing like how cool Dime riffs were.

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: And like a cool lyrical moment to accompany a sick pentatonic-y riff was crack.

I mean, it was cigarettes in jail to like skinny jean dudes on the scene. So seems the high horse is taking them all home. I can’t leave myself out is a great line, and it’s just delivered with so much author- like so much gravitas during this part. And then from the Pantera riff, it goes into a blues jam.

And so just for me, it’s just like all this sort of pentatonic stuff back to back when you haven’t really gotten anything modally like that at all on this record so far. And then it sort of climbs up into a galloping, the cowbell riff that’s like Kansas, you know? It’s like a classic hard rock riff.

And you can kinda… That almost gets you like your thumb on your belt buckle a little, getting you ready to,

Cliff: Yeah. And he brings the little roads out in the

Kyle: Yeah. Yes. Yes. and then, so that’s at 4:35, so you’re at two and a half minutes fully of this. And then at 6:45, they call back the Pantera riff, but they redress the stuff around it differently, and you’re like, “Oh, there it was again.

I love that.” and then by seven and a half minutes, that whole thing has gone away. But that is like, again, four minutes of the most satisfying, just pure musical expression I’ve ever experienced in my life. And every time I start to feel the build right around two minutes of “Ants in the Sky,” I’m…

it is exactly like getting on a rollercoaster for me and going up that first hill and then being like, “It’s happening, it’s happening, it’s happening. Oh, we’re going.” And then it’s the length of a rollercoaster ride. It’s so pure and beautiful for me, and I’m so glad that after all these years, it still hits the same, ’cause like so little does, but it retains that pure childlike joy and wonder for me.

And so I’m, I’m very glad for that little bit of music. And then it just f**ks off into some other stuff for a long t- for a long time. And then you get to pure smooth Pat Metheny jazz and you’re like, “Wait, well, hold on. How did we get here? I like it. Glad to be here. How did I get so many doors down from the dive bar that I was

just in? I’ll stay on this street a while. Maybe this is my favorite part of town now. I don’t know.”

Cliff: So much to say and realizing that at my current rate, we’ll be here until at least Friday. So I’ll say from here I play this song a lot on guitar we do it because it is hard, not because it is easy. It’s really fun to play. It’s also just like a really challenging exercise,

Kyle: I think you have to say,

If, John F. Kennedy heard “Between the Buried and Me,” it would make his head explode. I feel like he-

Cliff: Oh, Jesus Christ. Honestly, that’s exactly something that they would post on Instagram and be like, “Come to our show in Detroit,” you know?

Kyle: No, in Dallas.

Cliff: That’s what they want you to think

Kyle: Uh, we’ll be signing T-shirts up on the Knoll

Cliff: This whole song is ridiculous, but the guitar work especially is ridiculous for all the things we pointed out. But if nothing else, check out just like the last five seconds. They’re just like, “Hold on, I haven’t played enough f**king notes for you yet. Let me play some of the fastest s**t.” The way that I had to slow it down to 20% to understand what it was to learn it was outrageous.

It’s so cool. It’s so crazy. It’s so fun. And then they do all of it right here at the end, and then “Prequel to the Sequel” hits, and it’s like, “What’s up? I’m a f**king NES hero. I am in a video game.”

Kyle: Just the biggest chest pumping major chord like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do this, bro.”

Cliff: I saw somebody refer to it as the Star Fox riff.

Kyle: Oh my God. Yes

Cliff: Yeah, I feel like I’m riding Nyan Cat into the ether. There’s a bunch of cool stuff here. Oh,

what?

Kyle: have you ever hit the crispiest dap of your life that echoes throughout a lobby? That’s– It feels like that

kind of a handshake.

Cliff: for sure.

Kyle: We’re gonna go save the galaxy

Cliff: I’ll skip some of the timestamps here, uh, in favor of general timing, but I will point out one thing that calls to a little thing we buried in several episodes. There is a guest vocalist on this one, and it is Adam Fisher from Fear Before the March of Flames, who had just recently before this made the “Art Damage” record that I talk about, with a lot of love and compassion in everywhere that I can shove that into.

So not a lot of guest work for this band in general, so it was cool to have someone like that on this song, uh, and create something a little bit different. Also, like, Tommy, as opposed to most vocalists, kinda does every metal vocal style which is something we haven’t mentioned. He’s pretty, pretty good at what he does.

Yeah. so to have somebody else who could do something actually materially different from him was a cool way to bring in some texture. then we’ve mentioned here a couple of times, but, like, “Viridian” is a straight up end-to-end n- non-metal track for you if you’d like, and has, starting at around 50 seconds in, is a bass solo that should delight you if you’re alive and on planet Earth.

Dan Briggs could carry five bands on his 5’8″ back. Uh, I don’t know how tall he is, but I think he’s n- normal size like me. dude is just incredible. I… The more that I listen to him, the more I want to listen to what he does. every bit of everything this band has done is interesting because of what he does.

Uh, and his other music is really cool too, so. Even styles I’m not super into, it’s just like I respect the s**t out of it. It’s incredible to watch.

Kyle: I know he’s got a couple of projects. Trioscapes is the other big one.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah,

Cliff: Yeah, and he’s got one working up now and I can’t remember the name of it off the top. Well, “Orbs” was another one a while back that he did as well. so anyway he’s just an incredible person to listen to across any of these records.

but like I mentioned at the top, so even just generically speaking, Between the Buried and Me does similarly shaped things on other records. So they have tracks like this on a lot of other records. So “Shove and I’ll Take Two,” on earlier records than on “Alaska,” “Medicine Wheel” and “Laser Speed” both are super chill, for different reasons and really cool.

In a later release “Desert of Song” is a cool super chill interlude. Honestly, you could make a decent EP just out of songs that they do that are like this and you’d have a good time and I wouldn’t hate you for it at all. Then I suppose the, the last song which we must cover. Speaking of all the energy that we’ve talked about so far and being the age we were and with friends and everything that we were, and yes, the, the hoedown and the silliness of everything that’s involved in liking this music, yes, all those things are still true.

On the other hand, “White Walls” is like so f**king important to me that it makes me kind of want to cry sometimes because like it was, it be- like it became shorthand. Saying white walls to another person that I knew or that they would say it to me became shorthand for like, you got this. You’re about to do whatever it is you

Kyle: Go for it.

Cliff: Yeah

don’t listen to the people who aren’t with you right now. I mean, I guess in modern terms that would’ve been f**k the haters. We didn’t know how to say that back then. It was more like your mom is very upset with you. Um, but, but nevertheless, there were important moments and this song came at an important moment and it’s about being at an important moment and saying, “I understand what I have in front of me and I’m gonna do whatever it is that I want to do with it, with intention, knowing that this is what I will be about.

This is my whole existence, is what I’m doing right now and in this moment.” The simplicity and directness of that combined with the song that it is and how much it just, it hypes you up no matter how much you want it to,

Kyle: I, I rue the millennial misuse of the word epic. I, I hate how that word has gotten watered down, and I, I almost shudder to say it out loud. But in the classic dictionary definition, in the original literary sense of the term, this song is an epic. It is epic in its proportion and ambition. If you are fresh off the energy, once again, of Nolan’s “Odyssey,” the “White Walls” is that.

“White Walls” is an epic, and it is meant to inspire epic feelings in your being, and I love that after all these years, it still does that for you. Because there are many cliffs that I know and have attempted to describe over our conversations in this podcast, but one of the best cliffs and, and one of the ones that I probably don’t appreciate out loud enough is the one that’s like, ” I can f**king do anything.”

You maybe alluded to it a little with the like I can go conquer, literally conquer a mountain with my body,” when we were talking about twigs. But there’s the like “I didn’t have a college education for this. I can just figure out, computers and I can be a philosopher and a computer person and a whatever,” or, “I can move across the country and restart my life in a way that makes me happy.”

“White Walls” reflects the same stunning clarity through which it has always seemed that you can pierce through space and time with your vision for what it means to be alive as a human on this earth. So I admire that. It is very much you in song form in a lot of ways. Too much earnest, Cliff has to cut the episode. Staring directly at the eclipse without sunglasses

Cliff: Well, you know as well as I do that it’s never fear in that moment. It’s, I contain at least three multitudes, all of whom want to respond to this at the same time, Yep. That’s what I’m saying. You wanna go as big as possible. You are the most earnest person that I know. It, d- it’s too much, you know? So I needed to give you s- I needed to give you some sunglasses for the cyclops lasers of your heart

Honestly, albums like this helped me to do it back then when it felt like I was exploding in every direction at one time

Kyle: The hard and the soft, like I would put this with “Me Without You,” as like the, the two things that helped you focus

that big energy in the two right ways, for the, the two types of people that you would run across in your life.

Cliff: Honestly, and maybe this will connect to another human being on Earth, but yeah, I actually wrote down you know, I shared in that episode, like if “Me Without You” taught me how to like love with my whole chest, this band taught me to f**king think with my whole brain. My whole life up until then, for better or worse, people had told me intentionally or not and this, this feels so stupid knowing people like you.

I know so many smart people now, but before I like was

Kyle: Yeah. You can’t help where you go to high school, you know?

Cliff: Or, or just, you know, the people that your parents put you around are the people that your parents put you around one way or the other. And ev- yes, but in terms of like smartness, right? I, I was, for better or worse, often told like, “If you find yourself feeling like the smartest person in the room, like you need to shut up so that someone else doesn’t feel bad about it,” which doesn’t have a totally bad energy and maybe can be communicated to a child, but is not the thing that you should carry as is forward.

And I didn’t know how to do that. And stuff like this, y- hearing things again that made me go, “Music can be like this,” was like, “Oh, I can be like this.” I do not have to shy away from the fact that I can think about five things at the speed that most people can crank out about one and a half. Like I’m good to go.

I’m sandbagging myself at all moments in reality. I’m stuck on a psychedelic forever. Like this is who I am. And like this, “White Walls” especially like contains all of that within it. I’m gonna do all this s**t. I’m gonna be tough as nails. And then also I’m gonna end on a pleasant sweet note.

Kyle: I’m just picturing that meme of Hannibal Buress on Eric Andre looking at his hands like, “Oh, I can do this?” Oh, beautiful

Cliff: There are moments within them, but Out of all of it, honestly, like the, the main one that it came back to that was fun for the payoff, once again you’d get an “Ants of the Sky”-esque, “I know this song and I know what’s coming” from people who are at these shows. And so at eight minutes and 30 seconds comes the first time you get the breakdown that everyone was waiting on in the song.

I can’t express how much I love that to this day. They continued to write songs, especially like ones at the end of the album, like “Swim to the Moon” off their next album, just absolutely a barn burner. Insane. And just like we’re gonna shove all of it into the last song that we have, and also we’re just gonna mostly play set lists full of the last songs on all of our albums and just the intensity that goes all the way up and then comes all the way back down off of just from 100 to nothing and then builds all the way back up to it again

Kyle: I mean, imagine, like really, really think about being the kind of band that your greatest hits is also your, your most epic compositions. Like that’s the thing that people want from you. That’s the community of appreciators that you’ve built around you. I, it speaks– You have to be a special, intentional, a- and diligent and committed kind of musician to create it speaks– You have to be a special, intentional, and diligent and committed kind of musician to create that sort of thing that exists at all and, and then to be found by people.

That’s a level of resonance that seems almost mythological, but, but they’ve done it.

Cliff: I will, unless you want me to call out anything particular here, you’re ob- obviously welcome to. The only other thing I’ll mention is this was an especially self-referential period in their lives, uh, especially lyrically. And so in this song, which is about them being who they’re going to be, they do some like, it’s not even a veiled reference, it’s just a direct reference.

There’s a line that says, “They chose Camilla and we stood by her the entire time.” Like, this is a reference to a song off “Silent Circus” that they’re ef- they’re effectively saying, “We already don’t like that song very much, but we play it for you because we f**king know you like it.”

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: And, like, to bring that in here is cool and, like, I’m not gonna overthink it either in this moment.

I’m sure when the lyrics were written, it’s not an overly serious thing. But again, this, like, that reinforces the sorta ethos of this band. Like, “Mm, okay, we did have that cool song that you liked. What if, though, we did better? We actually want you to listen to this instead. Like, we actually think that’s not as good as this thing over here and we need you to hear this, and we don’t wanna do that, but we appreciate you for liking it.”

Like, that’s the kinda s**t I’m into, okay? There were a lot of bands at this time,

Kyle: Thinking Man’s 311 down.

Cliff: Well, and, to take a, a bit of uh, a shot for a band that I do honestly love and loved a lot during this time. Like, He Is Legend complained a lot at this time about playing “I Am Hollywood,” which is a two minute and 41 second song that everyone loves them for and they hated playing it.

Kyle: They blew, they blew up their career over it, like hon- let’s be honest. And now, and, and now what? Have done two years straight of touring on that record, and it’s a bit like, all

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: you.

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: I can say that as maybe the person who’s seen more “He Is Legend” shows than any living

person, and the person who has been the most supportive of this band, like the, the most vocal fan of that band maybe ever.

and I’m still excited for whatever they do next and, and think they’re incredible. But, uh, I endured “The Slings & Arrows,” so I can say f**k you guys, that was stupid

Cliff: it was just not a fun energy when you like the song. So to come to this instead and it be a little bit of a softer landing for like,

Kyle: Yeah. Kind of the same thing in a different font.

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Kyle: I mean, the, the only other thing that I would say about ” White Walls,” being in many ways one of their masterpiece songs is, Dan Briggs, the bassist, wrote a thing for Metal Injection that’s like a, a luxurious artifact, not the kind of thing that you get very often.

Sometimes you’ll get things where they’ll tell you their headspace of the record right after they’ve made the record, you know, and they’ll, they’ll get kinda in the weeds on stuff. This is a th- an essay that Dan wrote as they were preparing to go out on tour for this record for the 10th anniversary. So there’s, like, the clarity of what we were thinking when we made it, plus the hindsight of how much we’ve evolved since then.

And he wrote a good bit about “White Walls.” He wrote about how the song ends on a G-sharp minor chord, if I recall correctly, and then, you know, loops back around to it at the top. He wrote about how the buildup into the breakdown came from a section in two minutes and 30 seconds of “Ants in the Sky,” and the key change is also from the progression in “Ant.”

So, like, the variation stuff is on display between some of their big epic things. But the, thing that I hadn’t really thought much about until he wrote about it in this essay was, like, once again, Blake Richardson, Blake the Steak appreciation post. The last two-thirds of the song or the last third from nine minutes on is a polyrhythm masterclass, and it is a, it’s a technical chops clinic.

Dan said, “Blake kind of works in mysterious ways to this day. He can find a way to take a riff that feels weird or a chunk of a song, and either by just deleting it or rearranging a few pieces and writing transitions, he can make it suddenly work perfectly, which is a great asset to have when you’re putting such a long song together.”

There are things that he’s playing that, like, even in the era of y- you know, like, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out and now kids can do tricks that were previously thought of as physically impossible You watch some of those guys on TikTok now that can play like Slipknot one-handed and whatever, and some of these things may seem kind of passe, but like really honing in on the drumming for certain parts of this record, especially the end of this last song, you’re like, “I cannot believe a human body can do that.”

It does not make sense what is happening rhythmically

at all.

It’s so tight

Cliff: Yep. If we wanna cherry-pick any bit, 12 minutes and 10 seconds is so fast. It’s so fast. And then they go right back into something melodic. It’s… I literally wrote just like after I took a note of that, just like, “I love these dudes.” I just, I love this. And then like Kyle said, we, we end right back where we started on a piano chord that goes right back into the beginning, which is sick. So

Kyle: It, to your point about Queen, ends exactly like “Bohemian Rhapsody” with just the little, the little ascending notes, you know, which makes it feel all, the more epic in that way

Cliff: Absolutely. Yeah. This band has always felt to me like a band who could perform at the scale of like Live Aid ’84 type stuff, right? Just like

Kyle: lit- literally on top of a mountain with a laser show.

Cliff: Yes. And, uh, you know, I, I don’t, I don’t know whether it’s bittersweet or not that they never found a huge audience to the extent that peers like Gojira or somebody like that did.

Um, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I do know they’ve been touring consistently for this entire time. They seem to love music. They continue to crank out awesome stuff and like they’ve

Kyle: Including their new record from ear- earlier this year, last year? When did “Blue Nowhere” come out?

Cliff: It should’ve been late last year, yeah.

Kyle: So good. Just, just re-listened to it. Like, I’d put “God Terror” up there with anything that they’ve ever done. A great record, and still, uh, taking risk is a weird phrase for this band, where it’s like, what, what does that even mean?

still producing different sounds that, give y- I still have the capacity to be surprised by the kinds of things they, they incorporate

Cliff: Totally. To that note, calling out God Tear. They released a live version of that from Denver in 2025, and I was like, “Hey, oh, I was there. You can hear me breathing.”

Kyle: You can’t. It was very loud, but I appreciate it

Cliff: Yeah Do you want to point me in a direction to quickly run through some of where to go next? Or should I rip it? Or would you like to go

Kyle: I mean, I have such a long list that I, I thought it, it might be helpful if I actually specifically pointed to just a handful of records,

Cliff: Yeah, sure

Kyle: actual records. But I’d be much more interested in what you– Like, we’re speaking your language on this thing. I’d be much more interested in what you have to say, and then if I have any, like, big gaps to fill in, I might, I might do that.

Cliff: Okay, let’s do it. I’m betting I’ll have some crossover with, with things you have in the

Kyle: I feel pretty safe assuming that.

Cliff: We know each other and have been

Kyle: We’ve been side by side at enough shows of this exact kind of thing that, like, I got a pretty good idea

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah. You know, sometimes theoretically our wives ask us, “What do you guys talk about at dinner?” This f**king, this. This

Kyle: Where we’re going, we don’t

Cliff: is what we’re about to play. Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: I order catfish and then we… Yes. So, so one, first of all, delighted to say this band has an extreme catalog. There is a lot of music

Kyle: we’re up

Cliff: to Something like that, man. Persistent, different, consistently great. Like, I don’t love every record the same, but they’re all really, really good.

Kyle: But I respect them all.

Cliff: Yes. Um, for me, my favorite like run or collection of the… Well, first let me mention, like I mentioned earlier, they literally made a sort of like sequel to this record called “Colors II” and released in 2021.

It’s very cool. If you like this record, and especially if you listen to it a few times to pick up on some of the things we’re talking about, you will enjoy it because then they do a meta version of that on a totally different record entirely. Just, uh, yeah, you, you gotta earn that level of nerd,

Kyle: But to be clear, it’s not like a nostalgia cash-in. It’s

Cliff: Different songs

Kyle: it’s not the same thing. But yeah, it’s– We were trying to evoke the same intensity of inspiration that we were feeling. It was like we felt like we were at another do or die moment, so let’s really go for it and like make our most intense, most BT BAM record possible on this thing.

It was, it was like a rallying cry.

Cliff: Yes, and you’ll catch references to the music itself from “Colors,” which is just a fun thing,

Kyle: Which is very cool to be able to do that without tipping into too many nods, too much callback, all sort of thing. Yeah.

Cliff: So that’s pretty easy. Uh, again, I, I’ve loved a lot of it. My, my favorite kind of run though is through this one, through “Colors,” they do “The Great Misdirect,” which is also great, and then they hit “The Parallax” and “The Parallax II.” To me, in the we are searching for progressive technical prog something, when they were doing that move, that was the apex of it.

“Parallax II” is one of the coolest sounding metal records I’m aware of. It’s got hooks I’ll never forget. It’s got parts like we talked about today. It, it’s, it’s got everything mixed in.

Kyle: I mean, if there were no “Ants of the Sky,” “Telos” would be my favorite BTBAM song. The, the “Was I ever really alive” part toward the end of that is like… I had not listened to that record when we saw them on that tour, and I remember seeing that song being like, “Damn, dude.” It just blew me away.

Cliff: Yep. So I’d point people directly to that one, especially if you were kind of captured by the major key and kinda anthemic moments that they’ll do. I, I just… It really feels dialed in by that particular point. And I mean, dude, that was 2012. 2012 was such a weird and awesome year in general. Um, the, the Mayans left us on read and everything went downhill after that.

Um,

Kyle: Oh, the apocalypse already happened, Cliff.

Cliff: I, I know. But you were one of the only people I could tell at the time that I was actually disappointed that the thing didn’t happen, ’cause I knew what day it was supposed to happen.

Kyle: The green flash. Yeah, the green flash was the friends we made along the way

Cliff: So lots to love in their discog- discography. Going backwards is less recommended, not ’cause it’s bad, but because they became a totally different band like we were talking about by the time “Alaska” came around. So “Silent Circus” is awesome. “Alaska” is awesome. I love both of those. The self-titled is a little less, especially if you’re identifying with a lot of the things on this record.

So, uh, all good there. Now I think I can point in some generic directions that are inspired by different aspects of what this band is doing, because let me tell you, Kyle hinted at, at this earlier, but I gotta say, as somebody who likes this band, I sure don’t f**king like any of the bands that are related to them according to various algorithms.

I, like, I cannot e- explain it. I don’t know. And like, and these are bands who are, like, in Associated Press in 2009 being like, “This band is because of Between the Buried and Me.”

And I’m like, “I… Okay, I don’t hear it, but okay, you did get an eight-string guitar, and that is pretty cool to see, I guess.” but pointing in a few different directions, none of which are basically this band sounds like this band.

One of them would be, uh, especially if you like the sort of larger, more… Like Kyle described it as epic without being millennially cringe. Like, Opeth is where you wanna go if you’re sort of into metal darkness. I like this. I like some singing. I like melody. Like, Opeth is pretty rad, man. Gojira is not far behind in my book.

Both, you know, across the seas cousins of this type of music exactly. I’m sure Opeth themselves were, an influence on Between the Buried and Me to begin with. But uh, I mean, seeing Gojira at the Olympics, uh, uh, when that happened was cool, but all I could think about was how much they probably owed that to bands like Between the Buried and Me, which they have more or less talked about in the past, which is cool.

in in another sort of direction of if you can get down with the metal aspect of it and maybe turn the knob up to where it doesn’t go back to, uh, as much of the sort of melodic major key stuff, a band me and Kyle have seen a lot who is, like, taking over the world now, Blood Incantation is

Kyle: yeah

Cliff: they are the we take music seriously, don’t you love us for it band of the day.

S- so

Kyle: Yeah, that, that Blood Incantation set at Decibel filled me… I, I hadn’t made the connection till you just said it, but it filled me with the same feelings of like, music can be this? And, and on its face, so much of it is just like metal stuff, but they do it so well, and it’s how they do it, and it’s the visuals and the ideas and the everything between the more traditional parts.

yeah, they are– That’s a superb outfit, Blood Incantation, who just played at Pompeii,

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: uh, which is incred- Were they opening for Opeth? Somebody like that.

Cliff: I think so, yeah

Kyle: Just a great moment, and obviously both of those bands owe a great debt to Pink Floyd. Um, so a beautiful full circle moment there.

Cliff: Totally. Totally. Moving through a few other categories quickly. I’ll call this category time signatures are just a number, but I sing sometimes.

Dillinger Escape Plan, Car Bomb, Callous Daoboys are all in this, “Oh, okay, I enjoy not totally knowing what’s gonna happen next” category. If you’re down, that is a cool rabbit hole to chase.

There’s a lot of cool music in just in those three bands, honestly. Um, but everything else connected to it is pretty cool.

Kyle: Callous Da Boyz is not one that I had thought of. If you dialed up the BTBAM sense of humor to like E-E-ETID level f**kery,

Cliff: a good call. Yeah.

Kyle: where it’s like, “All right, kids,” that’s Callous Da Boyz. But yeah, they are constantly doing stuff musically where I’m like, “Mm, that, that’s good.” It’s like watching a young basketball player where you’re like, “Oh, the game’s about to change.”

That last Callous Da Boyz record, every time I listen back through it, I’m like, “S**t, this is something else, bro.”

Cliff: And, and another good just specific example of the like, if you’re not down with it, it feels random and frustrates you. But as soon as you sort of click into it, it’s, “Oh, okay, no, this is part of the riff. I get it.” So lots to chase there. In a similar but much more like m- mature and all the dads will understand where you’re coming from vein is just like bands of everyone being especially good and playing full out all the time. So Led Zeppelin, The Mars Volta, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham, and I would even give a pretty loose association to like Miles Davis in his bandleader era, where it was just like controlled chaos of everyone doing

Kyle: Like 70s miles?

Cliff: Yes. Yeah

This is definitely, like you said, more precise and less abstract than that, but in the, in the sense of controlling

Kyle: Yeah, but in the best moments of like a Pangea,

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: you get that same sense, yeah.

 

Kyle: BT BAM is like you could recommend a whole bunch of free jazz, like I thought about Coltrane’s “Ascension,”

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah

Kyle: or Albert Ayler, and then I thought about jazz fusion, like you said, Mahavishnu or like a Weather Report.

Billy Cobham’s “Spectrum” I think is probably the best like sort of point in the middle of that triangle. It is very jazz-like, but it is a separate third thing from too free or too fusion-y, um, that makes it really cool.

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: And it is also not jazz metal, which is its own thing where it’s trying to be that, and I don’t like any of that.

With, with respect to the people doing it and doing it well, not my thing at all. BT BAM is good jazz metal because they’re not trying to play jazz or metal

Cliff: Yes. Yes. Also, I’ll mention in a second what I believe will be the closest thing to jazz metal that you do like that I know for sure. But before we get there, a couple other categories. Uh, this would be the Meadly Me category. So just like people playing really f**king fast and it’s not always great, but it’s really entertaining to watch people do it this way.

Um, Archspire is a band I saw recently. They’re some f**king goobers, man. Honestly, like it’s, it’s a little silly to see them live. It’s also incredibly precise and wild.

Kyle: They’re so good

Cliff: it’s so wild to see.

but other bands who were doing similar sort of wild stuff even at this time would’ve been in bands that would’ve gone on tour with them or did.

So The Fall of Troy and Protest the Hero were pretty big offshoots of this genre of music back then. Like fast drumming, fast guitar playing, you know, quick time changes and stuff. Um, can’t say there’s a huge dis-

Kyle: and really soulful, like good songcraft once again. Songs that if you technically executed them with a lot less flourish would just be like good pop songs

Cliff: Yeah. totally. So two more bands in this category that don’t meet that criteria, but uh, Dragonforce and Buried Alive are both bands that are like, “Listen, man, I’m not saying go love yourself for loving Dragonforce all the time or whatever,” although they did just get the Arch Enemy singer in. That’s interesting.

Kyle: DragonForce did?

Cliff: yeah, yeah.

Kyle: Jesus.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: They got enough of a following still where that’s a financially viable decision for

Cliff: Yep. This, yes.

This, it’s gonna be pretty huge for them. It’s kinda cool. Um, I say that as a not Dragon Force fan.

Kyle: I remember an opener, I’m not going to name this person, writing on their MySpace blog, like I, I remember reading it sitting at my computer in my college apartment, said…

And they’d been on tour with him for like a month, and he said, “I would rather listen to the death rattle of my own child than ever hear ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ again.” That person doesn’t have any children, by the way. They prob- they probably remember that that was not a good, good thing to do.

Cliff: I nevertheless don’t disagree with the sentiment.

Kyle: Not how I would’ve said it, but, uh, I get where you’re coming from, man.

Cliff: Swinging back into a co- uh, more categories you’ll be m- happier with, I think. For– I, I just kinda called this intensity or otherwise, like, commitment to the sort of musical bit that’s happening here. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s gonna happen all here together, but the band The Ocean did things like this. Uh, you already mentioned it, but “Crack the Sky” by Mastodon. It– like, if I had to pair another record with “Colors” ever, it would be “Crack the Sky.” It is, it is a compliment. other bands that had different amounts of longevity but sort of differently commit to the intensity of the music. Rolo Tomassi is a band that’s still taking off and doing really well in this sense.

They sound

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: but

Kyle: really matured.

Cliff: yeah, I, I love their stuff. A couple of bands that popped up faster or more temporarily for a while. Destrage was a band that put out a couple of

records that touched on this. Yeah. Um, they g- they got kinda close. It was interesting. Similar to that Cloudkicker, especially the like, original instrumental kind of metal adjacent records were pretty similar to what’s happening here.

And then also another band I’ve tried to bury in references before, but Buried Alive wrote a concept record called “Chronoclast,” which was just a black metal record about the nature of

Kyle: Wait, Buried Alive or Buried Inside?

Cliff: Thank you. Buried Inside. Yes.

Buried Alive is the band I mentioned earlier with the colorful guitars. Yes. Buried Inside is the band that didn’t exist for long enough.

Yes. Uh, and then… So this was the band I was saying that’s probably the closest to jazz metal. They do like Ethel Duath and especially the … Yeah, it’s never a cool way to say

it. Uh, yeah. Um, but especially uh, A Painter’s Palette, I think it was called, was the one back in the day that was really adjacent to all this stuff.

But it also reminded me of like one-off type bands that did cool stuff in the MySpace to, like MySpace to Facebook transition era. So Ethel Duath re- reminded me of it, yes, but, uh, Blueprint Car Crash was one that only put out one EP that had this weird like math rock thing to it. Another one that was actually produced by Jamie King, the producer of this record, “Nocturne” by The Human Abstract

Kyle: Oh, Human Abstract.

Cliff: They were another band who sort of walked up to what Between the Buried and Me was doing, but, but weren’t able to, you know, necessarily carry it for long. Uh, and then I even mentioned because they came to mind in that context, uh, Red Sparowes, like a semi super group of like Isis and Neurosis related people

who

Kyle: yeah

Cliff: post-rock and things like that.

Kyle: They were the best of the, they were the best of the bunch, man. Those Red Sparowes records. Uh, I’m thinking of two. “The Fear Excruciating,” and then the,

The like the 2006 one and then the 2010 one. Yeah, they were, they were great

Cliff: honestly, and I, and I feel like, you know, I wrote a couple other ones down that are more like, uh, if you super love prog, you should probably make sure you’ve listened to Rush and Yes and f**king Porcupine Tree and stuff, ’cause you can work your way up to this. But honestly, to me, in this context, and especially this deep in the episode, that feels like the most obvious thing.

If you’re gonna like prog, you probably already know this about yourself already, uh, and have walked that path.

I kinda doubt this would be the front door to any of that. I’m much more interested into it, or in it becoming a path to a lot of the other things we mentioned.

Kyle: Yeah. so I do have a couple of bumper ones then. I would say there’s a handful in the context of, wow, I can’t believe all this stuff was happening right at the same time and sort of maybe influen- you know, like they were aware of each other, if not going so far as influencing each other. But just in the like 2005, 2006 moment of really taking big swings, there was a record we talk about all the time in Francis the Mute.

Like “De-Loused” was a seminal record for, it was a band’s band record from the a- you know, mostly the At the Drive-In guys. But then Francis the Mute was like this big freaky prog thing that it still blows my mind that it broke through in the mid 2000s and the height of the OC puka shell necklace bro culture.

You know what I mean? We talked about Fear Before the record around that time that they said they were playing in the van a lot was “The Always Open Mouth”. A band that I’m pretty sure you put me onto, but I know we both like, Intronaut, the first Intronaut

Cliff: Hell yeah

Kyle: LP, “Void.” Uh, they put out the EP “Null,” uh, but the LP was “Void,” and they’ve done a bunch of great stuff since then.

But I remember us both, Intronaut and Into the Moat were two records where we were like, “This is incredible.” And it was just sort of a moment and, like, I don’t think In the, Into the Moat has done stuff necessarily like Intronaut has kept on plugging.

Cliff: Internauts got a lot of great

Kyle: They got a lot of great records, and, and their best stuff is their newer stuff for me.

But “Void” was 2006. I can’t believe we haven’t talked about Meshuggah more than we did. but, like, you could pick any, you could point at any number of Meshuggah records and, and make an apt comparison in terms of the… I mean, that’s sort of the thesis of the whole Meshuggah episode is, like, pushing the physical and mental limits of what’s possible with, uh, what we can pull down from musical understanding.

But I specifically think of “Catch 33” ’cause it was 2005, and they made a record like, that they intended for it to be physically impossible to write and play, and then they learned it. And that feels very in the spirit of BT BAM. It, it’s just like, it’s a very, that’s a bruising record to get through. You would probably say “I,” the 21-minute one-song EP that came immediately before that, that I think is still, like, a favorite Meshuggah of yours.

But “Catch 33” is it for me. And then you mentioned “Crack the Skye,” but I would say “Blood Mountain” ’cause that’s like a, that’s a ferocious record. That was a major label debut for them, and they just went absolutely balls out. So it’s got the drop in intensity of “Alaska,” but it’s got some of the, like, weirdness of “Colors.”

They get kinda freaky in some parts. So I, I would encapsulate all those as, like, a ri- happening at the same time moment. And if you don’t understand why Cliff and my brains are the way that they are, it’s because our frontal cortexes were forming around the shape of records like this

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: when we were 18 years old.

Cliff: They, they tell you not to take acid when your frontal lobe is still forming, but they don’t tell you not to listen to Colors.

Kyle: To Francis the mute and colors, yeah, on repeat over and over and over again, morning, noon, and night. We’re fine-ish now. Then there’s like two to however many records from “The Anatomy Of,” like if you straight up look at their list of here are things we wanna point you back to from their covers album.

Two underappreciated– I mean, like they do “And Justice for All” on there. They do Pantera. They do Earth Crisis, which is– They do Earth Crisis into an acoustic Blind Melon song, which is like that is the chef’s kiss description of what you get from the BTBaM experience to me. But the two that I think are like underappreciated dimensions of what make them great creators are, Angel Dust” by Faith No More.

And I’m not personally like a huge Mike Patton band fan or appreciator. I, I just like can’t get my head around most of it. I did just see Tomahawk with the Melvins and that was sick. Um, still not 100% my thing, but I was like, “Okay, I get it. I respect this.” So “Angel Dust” by Faith No More, they cover “Malpractice” on “The Anatomy Of,” and then “Siamese Dream” by The Smashing

Pumpkins.

Cliff: sure

Kyle: You’re not gonna catch me defending William Corgan the person, but great guitar record, incredible songs on that. They cover “Geek USA” on that record. But there’s like a, there’s like a yearny component. It’s like yearning grunge. There’s a different emotional dimension to Smashing Pumpkins than any of their peer bands that kind of connects to the like Tears for Fears sort of, sort of melancholy, h- like no pun intended, aspect of that, that they draw out really well in guitar music.

So I would chalk a lot of that up, I would say, to Tommy Rogers maybe some Dan Briggs. You know, they all bring different vocabularies to the band, but there’s like a… There’s that emotional dimension that comes from rock songs. So Faith, Faith No More and Smashing Pumpkins. And then there’s like the classic rock and jazz stuff.

It’s, too 101 to not bear saying out loud that, like, if you love Colors, you should listen to “Dark Side of the

Moon.”

Cliff: yeah

Kyle: There’s a great anecdote also from Dan Briggs where he said in that same essay: “This is probably a good time to mention that I was wildly excited to finally be part of writing a concept album, even though I knew lyrically it wouldn’t be connected.

Of course, we were all expired– inspired by ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ but in high school, three of my favorite albums were Cursive’s ‘Ugly Organ,’ Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,’ and Dream Theater’s ‘Scenes From a Memory.’ So I’d been locked in and ready to do this for years. I just never had the opportunity.

It’s funny mentioning ‘Dark Side’ though. Tony, the head of Victory Records, initially said he didn’t like our cover ’cause it was too similar to Pink Floyd’s album cover ’cause it had black and rainbow colors. But later, when he flew us up to the office before the album was released to do a series of meetings with every branch at the label, he’d tell us that we were going to be the Pink Floyd of metal, and this was going to be our ‘Dark Side’ or some bulls**t.

He was the king of blowing smoke up your ass.” Having said all that, they do cover “Us and Them” on “The Anatomy Of,” and

like it just gets no better than, than “Dark Side of the Moon.” As much as I wanna destroy the part of myself that says a boomer thing out loud like that, you know? Like you’ll– When I start saying like, “Sgt.

Pepper’s is the best album ever,” then it’s time to wrap this podcast up, but I can at least be an apologist for “Dark Side.” And then th-three others. One is King Crimson, specifically “Red.” Like you mentioned a bunch of prog stuff, but I, I think King Crimson definitely, and “Red” feels the most like between the Buried and me of all of them.

I also like never got into this record, but I kept thinking about how when you were like 16 or 17, you were recommending “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” t-to people.

Cliff: F**king Genesis Records.

Kyle: Like you, you were into really heady stuff at, at way too young an age, and this was like pre, pre-psychedelics or anything. So I gotta give you your kudos for that.

The second one would be mentioned already, Billy Cobham’s “Spectrum” lights me up in exactly the same way that this record does. And then the, the third I would just like broadly point at Allan Holdsworth as an influence of theirs, guitarist from The Soft Machine, and went on to have like– You talked about crazy guitarists.

He’s a crazy guitarist who has… I don’t wanna compare him to Lou Reed, but has like taken on that breadth of stuff that he has done, and he’s had lots of different collaborators. Like he was on a great record with Jean-Luc Ponty in the ’70s, but there’s one record specifically that like the sampling hip-hop whatever guy in me is really into.

Uh, the drummer Tony Williams put together a band called the Tony Williams Lifetime, and they put out a record in 1975 called “Believe It” that Allan Holdsworth plays guitar on. So you can do solo Holdsworth, like “Metal Fatigue” from ’85. He had a record in the late ’90s or early 2000s that was like a straight-ahead jazz standards record.

But then there’s stuff like this Tony Williams record where he’s playing with like an all-time great drummer and sort of arguably playing circles around him. But it’s always nice to look for things that evoke the sensation that you mentioned a number of times, Cliff, where it’s like people who are individually very good doing the one plus one equals three and somehow becoming even better together than they could in their own thing, ’cause they’re all challenging each other.

Music can be this

Cliff: That makes me throw in one extra of them crooked vultures

Kyle: Oh, God. What a moment that was.

Cliff: Yep. But another pretty good example of just, “Oh, we’re gonna be good at this. Just hold on.” Yeah. Man, I loved all of that. Uh, ultimately, f- you know, uh, thank you everybody for this tour inside of my noggin. In general though, if e- even if you’re having a sort of like “Jesus Christ, why is he like this? Why– I’ve listened to so much about this now.”

Listen man, just that’s fine. Even if this doesn’t connect with you as is, you got something like this, right? Like you got something like this, right? Don’t you? And if you don’t, try to go find it probably now. If you got something like this, especially that hit you at an important moment in time and it means something to you, you could at minimum honor the spirit of this record, even if you’re not interested in it, by going and finding your version of whatever this is and sitting down and shutting your mouth and listening to it and feeling all the things you used to feel, remembering who you used to be, and thinking about who you’d like to be tomorrow, and thinking about, as they say so aptly, this is all you have when we die.

Like this is it. for me, a significant portion of my existence on planet Earth is tied up in this record and in this band. it’s meaningful to me and it lights me up in a great way that has paid off for, you know, decades now. And so I, again, even more so than like I want you to love this record, which I do, please give it a try.

If I have any trust of yours, please try at least once and check this thing out and see what lights you up. But if not, get that other thing that you know lights you up

Kyle: I you to love something

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: this record.

Cliff: Yes. And then sit and feel and be thankful that every now and then, no matter what happens, something like this exists in our life and we have some form of art that we can not only come back to but that like…

I don’t know. I, I find this to be a beautiful thing that something would be this meaningful to me, and it’s just five dudes, one of whom I’ve been on like a Zoom call with before. Just like there have been moments where like I really wanted to have like a cosmic moment with that dude, just like, “Do you know how important what you did was to me as a person?”

And it’s like that would be way too much. Uh, and so o- obviously I didn’t. But like to know that that’s real and that people are on the other side of this going, “Music can be like this. Do you wanna live your life as if music can be like this?” And I’m going, “Yes. Fucking White Walls all day.” Like if you can find something that matches this with anything that you’re feeling or experiencing, I really encourage you to go back to it, uh, and draw from that well again as many times as you can.

Kyle: that to create that sort of thing that exists at all and then to be found by people.

That’s a level of resonance that seems almost mythological, but, but they’ve done it.

Cliff: I will, unless you want me to call out anything particular here, you’re ob- obviously welcome to. The only other thing I’ll mention is this was an especially self-referential period in their lives, uh, especially lyrically. And so in this song, which is about them being who they’re going to be, they do some it’s not even a veiled reference, it’s just a direct reference.

There’s a line that says, “They chose Camilla and we stood by her the entire time.” Like, this is a reference to a song off “Silent Circus” that they’re ef- they’re effectively saying, “We already don’t like that song very much, but we play it for you because we f**king know you like it.”

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: to bring that in here is cool and, like, I’m not gonna overthink it either in this moment.

I’m sure when the lyrics were written, it’s not an overly serious thing. But again, that reinforces the sorta ethos of this band. Mm, okay, we did have that cool song that you liked. What if, though, we did better? We actually want you to listen to this instead. Like, we actually think that’s not as good as this thing over here and we need you to hear this, and we don’t wanna do that, but we appreciate you for liking it.”

That’s the kinda s**t I’m into, okay? There were a lot of bands at this time,

Kyle: Thinking Man’s 311 down.

Cliff: And, uh, to take a, a bit of a shot for a band that I do honestly love and loved a lot during this time. He Is Legend complained a lot at this time about playing “I Am Hollywood,” which is a two minute and 41 second song that everyone loves them for and they hated playing it.

Kyle: They blew, They blew, up their career over it,

like hon- let’s be honest. And now and now what? Have done two years straight of touring on that record, and it’s a bit like, all

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: you.

Cliff: Yes.

Kyle: I can say that as maybe the person who’s seen more “He Is Legend” shows than any living

person, and the person who has been the most supportive of this band, like the, the most vocal fan of that band maybe ever.

and I’m still excited for whatever they do next and, and think they’re incredible. But I endured “The Slings & Arrows,” so I can say f**k you guys, that was stupid

Cliff: it was just not a fun energy when you like the song. So to come to this instead and it be a little bit of a softer landing for like,

Kyle: Yeah. Kind of the same thing in a different font.

Cliff: yeah, Yeah,

exactly. Exactly.

Kyle: I mean, the, the only other thing that I would say about ” White Walls,” being in many piece– pla- being in many ways one of their masterpiece songs is, um, Dan Briggs, the bassist, wrote a thing for Metal Injection that’s like a, a luxurious artifact, not the kind of thing that you get very often.

Sometimes you’ll get things where they’ll tell you their headspace of the record right after they’ve made the record, you know, and they’ll, they’ll get kinda in the weeds on stuff. This is a th- an essay that Dan wrote as they were preparing to go out on tour for this record for the 10th anniversary. So there’s, like, the clarity of what we were thinking when we made it, plus the hindsight of how much we’ve evolved since then.

And he wrote a good bit about “White Walls.” He wrote about how the song ends on a G-sharp minor chord, if I recall correctly, and then, loops back around to it at the top. He wrote about how the buildup into the breakdown came from a section in two minutes and 30 seconds of “Ants in the Sky,” and the key change is also from the progression in “Ant.”

So, like, the variation stuff is on display between some of their big epic things. But the, the thing that I hadn’t really thought much about until he wrote about it in this essay was, like, once again, Blake Richardson Blake the Steak appreciation post. The last two-thirds of the song from, like… or the last third from nine minutes on is a polyrhythm masterclass, and it is a, it’s a technical chops clinic.

Dan said, “Blake kind of works in mysterious ways to this day. He can find a way to take a riff that feels weird or a chunk of a song, and either by just deleting it or rearranging a few pieces and writing transitions, he can make it suddenly work perfectly, which is a great asset to have when you’re putting such a long song together.”

There are things that he’s playing that, like, even in the era of y- you know, like, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out and now kids can do tricks that were previously thought of as physically impossible You watch some of those guys on TikTok now that can play like Slipknot one-handed and whatever, and some of these things may seem kind of passe, but like really honing in on the drumming for certain parts of this record, especially the end of this last song, you’re like, “I cannot believe a human body can do that.”

It does not make sense what is happening rhythmically

at all. It’s so tight

Cliff: Yep. If we wanna cherry-pick any bit, 12 minutes and 10 seconds is so fast. It’s so fast. And then they go right back into something melodic. I literally wrote just like after I took a note of that, just like, “I love these dudes.” I just, I love this. And then like Kyle said, we, we end right back where we started on a piano chord that goes right back into the beginning, which is sick. So

Kyle: It, to your point about Queen, ends exactly like “Bohemian Rhapsody” with just the little, the little ascending notes, you know, which makes it feel all, all the more epic in that way

Cliff: Absolutely. Yeah. This band has always felt to me like a band who could perform at the scale of like Live Aid ’84 type stuff, right? Just like

Kyle: lit- literally on top of a mountain

with a laser show.

Cliff: Yes. And, I don’t know whether it’s bittersweet or not that they never found a huge audience to the extent that peers like Gojira or somebody like that did.

Um, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, but I do know they’ve been touring consistently for this entire time. They seem to love music. They continue to crank out awesome stuff

Kyle: Including their new record from ear- earlier this year, last year? When did “Blue Nowhere” come out?

Cliff: It should’ve been late last year, yeah.

Kyle: So good. Just, just re-listened to it. Like, I’d put “God Terror” up there with anything that they’ve ever done. A great record, and still, uh, taking risk is a weird phrase for this band, where it’s like what does that even mean?

still producing different sounds that, I still have the capacity to be surprised by the kinds of things they incorporate

Cliff: Totally. To that note, calling out God Tear. They released a live version of that from Denver in 2025, and I was like, “Hey, oh, I was there. You can hear me breathing.”

Kyle: You can’t. It was very loud, but I appreciate it

Cliff: Yeah Do you want to point me in a direction to quickly run through some of where to go next? Or should I rip it? Or would you like to go

Kyle: I have such a long list that I, I thought it, it might be helpful if I actually specifically pointed to just a handful of records,

Cliff: Yeah, sure

Kyle: actual records. But I’d be m- I’d be much more interested in we’re speaking your language on this thing. I’d be much more interested in what you have to say, and then if I have any, like, big gaps to fill in, I might, I might do that.

Cliff: Okay, let’s do it. I’m betting I’ll have some crossover with things you have in the

Kyle: I feel pretty safe assuming that.

Cliff: We know each other and have been

Kyle: We’ve been side by side at enough shows of this exact kind of thing that, like, I got a pretty good idea

Cliff: You know, sometimes theoretically our wives ask us, “What do you guys talk about at dinner?” This f**king, this. This

Kyle: Where we’re going, we don’t

Cliff: is what we’re about to play. Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: I order catfish and then we… Yes. So one, first of all, delighted to say this band has an extreme catalog. There is a lot of music

Kyle: we’re up

Cliff: to

Something like that, man. Persistent, different, consistently great. I don’t love every record the same, but they’re all really, really good.

Kyle: But I respect them all.

Cliff: Yes. For me, my favorite like run or collection of the… Well, first let me mention, like I mentioned earlier, they literally made a sort of like sequel to this record called “Colors II” and released in 2021.

It’s very cool. If you like this record, and especially if you listen to it a few times to pick up on some of the things we’re talking about, you will enjoy it because then they do a meta version of that on a totally different record entirely. Just yeah you gotta earn that level of nerd,

Kyle: But to be clear, it’s not like a nostalgia cash-in.

It’s

Cliff: Different songs

Kyle: it’s not the same thing. But yeah, it’s– We were trying to evoke the same intensity of inspiration that we were feeling. It was like we felt like we were at another do or die moment, so let’s really go for it and like make our most intense, most BT BAM record possible on this thing.

It was like a rallying cry.

Cliff: Yes, and you’ll catch references to the music itself from “Colors,” which is just a fun thing,

Kyle: Which is very cool to be able to do that without tipping into too many nods, too much callback,

all sort of thing. Yeah.

Cliff: So that’s pretty easy. Again, I, I’ve loved a lot of it. My favorite kind of run though is through this one, through “Colors,” they do “The Great Misdirect,” which is also great, and then they hit “The Parallax” and “The Parallax II.” To me, in the we are searching for progressive technical prog something, when they were doing that move, that was the apex of it.

“Parallax II” is one of the coolest sounding metal records I’m aware of. It’s got hooks I’ll never forget. It’s got parts like we talked about today. It’s, it’s got everything mixed in.

Kyle: I mean, if there were no “Ants of the Sky,” “Telos” would be my favorite BTBAM song. The “Was I ever really alive” part toward the end of that is like… I had not listened to that record when we saw them on that tour, and I remember seeing that song being like, “Damn, dude.” It just blew me away.

Cliff: Yep. So I’d point people directly to that one, especially if you were captured by the major key and kinda anthemic moments that they’ll do. I, I just… It really feels dialed in by that particular point. And I mean, dude, that was 2012. 2012 was such a weird and awesome year in general. The, the Mayans left us on read and everything went downhill after that. Um,

Kyle: Oh, the apocalypse already happened, Cliff.

Cliff: I know. But you were one of the only people I could tell at the time that I was actually disappointed that the thing didn’t happen, ’cause I knew what day it was supposed to happen.

Kyle: The green flash.

Yeah, the green flash was the friends we made along the way

Cliff: So lots to love in their discog- discography. Going backwards is less recommended, not ’cause it’s bad, but because they became a totally different band like we were talking about by the time “Alaska” came around. “Silent Circus” is awesome. “Alaska” is awesome. I love both of those. The self-titled is a little less, especially if you’re identifying with a lot of the things on this record.

So, all good there. Now I think I can point in some generic directions that are inspired by different aspects of what this band is doing, because let me tell you, Kyle hinted at, at this earlier, but I gotta say, as somebody who likes this band, I sure don’t f**king like any of the bands that are related to them according to various algorithms.

I cannot e- explain it. I don’t know. And like, and these are bands who are, like, in Associated Press in 2009 being like, “This band is because of Between the Buried and Me.”

And I’m like, “I… Okay, I don’t hear it, but okay, you did get an eight-string guitar, and that is pretty cool to see, but so pointing in a few different directions, none of which are basically this band sounds like this band.

One of them would be, uh, especially if you like the sort of larger, more… Like Kyle described it as epic without being millennially cringe. Opeth is where you wanna go if you’re sort of into metal darkness. I like this. I like some singing. I like melody. Opeth is pretty rad, man. Gojira is not far behind in my book.

Both, across the seas cousins of this type of music exactly. I’m sure Opeth themselves were an influence on Between the Buried and Me to begin with. But seeing Gojira at the Olympics, uh, uh, when that happened was cool, but all I could think about was how much they probably owed that to bands like Between the Buried and Me, which they have more or less talked about in the past, which is cool.

in another sort of direction of if you can get down with the metal aspect of it and maybe turn the knob up to where it doesn’t go back to as much of the sort of melodic major key stuff, a band me and Kyle have seen a lot who is, like, taking over the world now, Blood Incantation

is

Kyle: yeah

Cliff: they are the we take music seriously, don’t you love us for it band of the day.

S- so

Kyle: Yeah, that, that Blood Incantation set at Decibel filled me… I hadn’t made the connection till you just said it, but it filled me with the same feelings of like, music can be this? and on its face, so much of it is just like metal stuff, but they do it so well, and it’s how they do it, and it’s the visuals and the ideas and the everything between the more traditional parts.

Um, yeah, they are– That’s a superb outfit, Blood Incantation, who just played at Pompeii,

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: uh, which is incred- Were they opening for Opeth? Somebody like that.

Cliff: I think so, yeah

Kyle: Just a great moment, and obviously both of those bands owe, owe a great debt to Pink Floyd. So a beautiful full circle moment there.

Cliff: Totally. Totally. Moving through a few other categories quickly. I’ll call this category time signatures are just a number, but I sing sometimes. Dillinger Escape Plan, Car Bomb, Callous Daoboys are all in this, “Oh, okay, I enjoy not totally knowing what’s gonna happen next” category. If you’re down, that is a cool rabbit hole to chase.

There’s a lot of cool music in just in those three bands, honestly. Um, but everything else connected to it is pretty cool.

Kyle: Callous Da Boyz is not one that I had thought of. If you dialed up the BTBAM sense of humor to like E-E-ETID level f**kery,

Cliff: a good call. Yeah.

Kyle: where it’s like, “All right, kids,” that’s Callous Da Boyz. But yeah, they are constantly doing stuff musically where I’m like, “Mm, that, that’s good.” It’s like watching a young basketball player where you’re like, “Oh, the game’s about to change.”

That last Callous Da Boyz record, every time I listen back through it, I’m like, “S**t, this is something else, bro.”

Cliff: And another good just specific example of the like, if you’re not down with it, it feels random and frustrates you. But as soon as you sort of click into it, it’s, “Oh, okay, no, this is part of the riff. I get it.” So lots to chase there. In a similar but much more like m- mature and all the dads will understand where you’re coming from vein is just like all…

bands of everyone being especially good and playing full out all the time. So Led Zeppelin, The Mars Volta, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham, and I would even give a pretty loose association to like Miles Davis in his bandleader era, where it was just like controlled chaos of everyone doing

Kyle: Like 70s miles?

Cliff: Yes. Yeah

This is definitely, like you said, more precise and less abstract than that, but in the, in the sense of controlling

Kyle: Yeah, but in the best moments of like a Pangea,

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: you get that same sense, yeah.

BT BAM is like you could recommend a whole bunch of free jazz, like I thought about Coltrane’s “Ascension,”

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah

Kyle: or Albert Ayler, and then I thought about jazz fusion, like you said, Mahavishnu or like a Weather Report.

Billy Cobham’s “Spectrum” I think is probably the best like sort of point in the middle of that triangle. But yeah, it’s a– It is very jazz-like, but it is a separate third thing from too free or too fusion-y, um, that makes it really cool.

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: And it is also not jazz metal, which is its own thing where it’s trying to be that, and I don’t like any of that.

With, with respect to the people doing it and doing it well, not my thing at all. BT BAM is good jazz metal because they’re not trying to play jazz or metal

Cliff: Yes. Yes. Also, I’ll mention in a second what I believe will be the closest thing to jazz metal that you do like that I know for sure. But before we get there, a couple other categories. This would be the Meadly Me category. So just like people playing really f**king fast and it’s not always great, but it’s really entertaining to watch people do it this way.

Archspire is a band I saw recently. They’re some f**king goobers, man. Honestly, like it’s, it’s a little silly to see them live. It’s also incredibly precise and wild.

Kyle: They’re so good

Cliff: it’s so wild to see. Um, but other bands who were doing similar sort of wild stuff even at this time would’ve been in bands that would’ve gone on tour with them or did.

So The Fall of Troy and Protest the Hero were pretty big offshoots of this genre of music back then. Like fast drumming, fast guitar playing, quick time changes and stuff. Can’t say there’s a huge dis-

Kyle: and really soulful, like good songcraft once again. Songs that if you technically executed them with a lot less flourish would just be like good pop songs

Cliff: Yeah. Yep, totally. So two more bands in this category that don’t meet that criteria, but uh, Dragonforce and Buried Alive are both bands that are like, “Listen, man, I’m not saying go love yourself for loving Dragonforce all the time or whatever,” although they did just get the Arch Enemy singer in. That’s interesting.

Kyle: DragonForce did?

Cliff: yeah,

yeah.

Kyle: Jesus.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: They got enough of a following still where that’s a financially viable decision for

Cliff: Yep. This, yes.

This, it’s gonna be pretty huge for them. It’s kinda cool.

Um, I,

say that as a not Dragon Force fan.

Kyle: I remember an opener, I’m not going to name this person, writing on their MySpace blog, like I, I remember reading it sitting at my computer in my college apartment said…

And they’d been on tour with him for like a month, and he said, “I would rather listen to the death rattle of my own child than ever hear ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ again.” That person doesn’t have any children, by the way. They prob- they probably remember that that was not a good, good thing to do.

Cliff: I nevertheless don’t disagree with the sentiment.

Kyle: Not how I would’ve said it, but, uh, I get where you’re coming from, man.

Cliff: Swinging back into a co- more categories you’ll be m- happier with, I think. For– I, I just kinda called this intensity or otherwise commitment to the sort of musical bit that’s happening here. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s gonna happen all here together, but the band The Ocean did

things like this. You already mentioned it, but “Crack the Sky” by Mastodon. It– like, if I had to pair another record with “Colors” ever, it would be “Crack the Sky.” It is a compliment. But other bands that had different amounts of longevity but sort of differently commit to the intensity of the music. Rolo Tomassi is a band that’s still taking off and doing really well in this sense.

They sound

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: but

Kyle: really matured.

Cliff: yeah I love their stuff. A couple of bands that popped up faster or more temporarily for a while. Destrage was a band that put out a couple of

records that touched on this. Yeah. They g- they got kinda close. It was interesting. Similar to that Cloudkicker, especially the original instrumental kind of metal adjacent records were pretty similar to what’s happening here.

And then also another band I’ve tried to bury in references before, but Buried Alive wrote a concept record called “Chronoclast,” which was just a black metal record about the nature of

Kyle: Wait, Buried Alive or Buried Inside?

Cliff: Thank you. Buried Inside. Yes.

Buried Alive is the band I mentioned earlier with the colorful guitars. Yes. Buried Inside is the band that didn’t exist for long

enough. Yes. So this was the band I was saying that’s probably the closest to jazz metal. They do like Ethel Duath and especially the … Yeah, it’s never a cool way to say

it. Uh, yeah. Um, but especially A Painter’s Palette, I think it was called, was the one back in the day that was really adjacent to all this stuff.

But it also reminded me of like one-off type bands that did cool stuff in the MySpace to, like MySpace to Facebook transition era. So Ethel Duath re- reminded me of it, yes, but Blueprint Car Crash was one that only put out one EP that had this weird like math rock thing to it. Another one that was actually produced by Jamie King, the producer of this record, “Nocturne” by The Human Abstract

Kyle: Oh, Human Abstract.

Cliff: They were another band who sort of walked up to what Between the Buried and Me was doing, but, but weren’t able to, you know, necessarily carry it for long. And then I even mentioned because they came to mind in that context Red Sparowes, like a semi super group of like Isis and Neurosis

related people

who

Kyle: yeah,

Cliff: post-rock and things like that.

Kyle: They were the best of the, they were the best of the bunch, man. Those Red Sparowes records. Uh, I’m thinking of two. The,

The

Fear excruciating.

and then

the “Those Who Die May…”

Cliff: Live forever?

Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah, yeah. The, the, the like the 2006 one and then the 2010 one.

they were great

Cliff: so yeah, h- honestly, and I, and I feel like, you know, I wrote a couple other ones down that are more like, uh, if you super love prog, you should probably make sure you’ve listened to Rush and Yes and f**king Porcupine Tree and stuff, ’cause you can work your way up to this. But honestly, to me, in this context, and especially this deep in the episode, that feels like the most obvious thing.

If you’re gonna like prog, you probably already know this about yourself already, uh, and have walked that path. I, kinda doubt this would be the front door to any of that. I’m much more interested into it, or in it becoming a path to a lot of the other things we mentioned.

Kyle: Yeah. so I do have a couple of bumper ones then. I would say there’s a handful in the context of, wow, I can’t believe all this stuff was happening right at the same time and sort of maybe influen- you know, like they were aware of each other, if not going so far as influencing each other. But just in the like 2005, 2006 moment of really taking big swings, there was a record we talk about all the time in Francis the Mute.

Like “De-Loused” was a seminal record for, it was a band’s band record from the a- you know, mostly the At the Drive-In guys. But then Francis the Mute was like this big freaky prog thing that it still blows my mind that it broke through in the mid 2000s and the height of the OC puka shell necklace bro culture.

You know what I mean? We talked about Fear Before that the record around that time that they said they were playing in the van a lot was “The Always Open Mouth”. A band that I’m pretty sure you put me onto, but I know we both like, Intronaut, the first Intronaut

Cliff: Hell yeah

Kyle: LP, “Void.” Uh, they put out the EP “Null,” but the LP was “Void,” and they’ve done a bunch of great stuff since then.

But I remember us both, Intronaut and Into the Moat were two records where we were like, “This is incredible.” And it was just sort of a moment and, like, I don’t think In the, Into the Moat has done stuff necessarily like Intronaut has kept

on

plugging.

Cliff: Internauts got a lot of great

Kyle: They got a lot of great records, and, and their best stuff is their newer stuff for me.

But “Void” was 2006. I can’t believe we haven’t talked about Meshuggah more than we did. you could pick any, you could point at any number of Meshuggah records and, and make an apt comparison in terms of the… I mean, that’s sort of the thesis of the whole Meshuggah episode is, like, pushing the physical and mental limits of what’s possible with, uh, what we can pull down from musical understanding.

But I specifically think of “Catch 33” ’cause it was 2005, and they made a record that they intended for it to be physically impossible to write and play, and then they learned it. And that feels very in the spirit of BT BAM. It’s just like, it’s a very, that’s a bruising record to get through. You would probably say “I,” the 21-minute one-song EP that came immediately before that, that I think is still, like, a favorite Meshuggah of yours.

But “Catch 33” is it for me. And then you mentioned “Crack the Skye,” but I would say “Blood Mountain” ’cause that’s like a, that’s a ferocious record. That was a major label debut for them, and they just went absolutely balls out. So it’s got the drop in intensity of “Alaska,” but it’s got some of the, like, weirdness of “Colors.”

They get kinda freaky in some parts. So I, I would encapsulate all those as, like, a ri- happening at the same time moment. And if you don’t understand why Cliff and my brains are the way that they are, it’s because our frontal cortexes were forming around the shape of records like this

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: when we were 18 years old.

Cliff: They, they tell you not to take acid when your frontal lobe is still forming, but they don’t tell you not to listen to Colors.

Kyle: To Francis the mute and

colors, yeah, on repeat over and over and over again, morning, noon, and night. We’re fine-ish now. Then there’s like two to however many records from “The Anatomy Of,” like if you straight up look at their list of here are things we wanna point you back to from their covers album.

Two underappreciated– I mean, like they do “And Justice for All” on there. They do Pantera. They do Earth Crisis, which is– They do Earth Crisis into an acoustic Blind Melon song, which is like that is the chef’s kiss description of what you get from the BTBaM experience to

me. But the two that I think are like underappreciated dimensions of what make them great creators are “Angel Dust” by Faith No More.

And I’m not personally like a huge Mike Patton band fan or appreciator. I just like can’t get my head around most of it. I did just see Tomahawk with the Melvins and that was sick. Still not 100% my thing, but I was like, “Okay, I get it. I respect this.” So “Angel Dust” by Faith No More, they cover “Malpractice” on “The Anatomy Of,” and then “Siamese Dream” by The Smashing

Pumpkins.

Cliff: sure

Kyle: You’re not gonna catch me defending William Corgan the person but great guitar record, incredible songs on that. They cover “Geek USA” on that record. But there’s like a, there’s like a yearny component. It’s like yearning grunge. There’s a different emotional dimension to Smashing Pumpkins than any of their peer bands that kind of connects to the like Tears for Fears sort of, sort of melancholy, h- like no pun intended aspect of that, that they draw out really well in guitar music.

So I would chalk a lot of that up, I would say, to Tommy Rogers maybe some Dan Briggs. You know, they all bring different vocabularies to the band, but there’s like a… There’s that emotional dimension that comes from like rock songs. So Faith, Faith No More and Smashing Pumpkins. And then there’s like the classic rock and jazz stuff.

it’s too 101 to not bear saying out loud that, like, if you love Colors, you should listen to “Dark Side of the

Moon.”

Cliff: yeah

Kyle: There’s a great anecdote also from Dan Briggs where he said in that same essay: “This is probably a good time to mention that I was wildly excited to finally be part of writing a concept album, even though I knew lyrically it wouldn’t be connected.

Of course, we were all expired– inspired by ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ but in high school, three of my favorite albums were Cursive’s ‘Ugly Organ,’ Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,’ and Dream Theater’s ‘Scenes From a Memory.’ So I’d been locked in and ready to do this for years. I just never had the opportunity.

It’s funny mentioning ‘Dark Side’ though. Tony, the head of Victory Records, initially said he didn’t like our cover ’cause it was too similar to Pink Floyd’s album cover ’cause it had black and rainbow colors. But later, when he flew us up to the office before the album was released to do a series of meetings with every branch at the label, he’d tell us that we were going to be the Pink Floyd of metal, and this was going to be our ‘Dark Side’ or some bulls**t.

He was the king of blowing smoke up your ass.” Having said all that, they do cover “Us and Them” on “The Anatomy Of,” and

like it just gets no better than “Dark Side of the Moon.” As much as I wanna destroy the part of myself that says a boomer thing out loud like that, When I start saying “Sgt.

Pepper’s is the best album ever,” then it’s time to wrap this podcast up, but I can at least be an apologist for “Dark Side.” And then th-three others. One is King Crimson, specifically “Red.” Like you mentioned a bunch of prog stuff, but I think King Crimson definitely, and “Red” feels the most like between the Buried and me of all of them.

I also like never got into this record, but I kept thinking about how when you were like 16 or 17, you were recommending “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” t-to people.

Cliff: F**king Genesis Records.

Kyle: Like you, you were into really heady stuff at, at way too young an age, and this was like pre, pre-psychedelics or anything. So I gotta give you your kudos for that.

The second one would be mentioned already, Billy Cobham’s “Spectrum” lights me up in exactly the same way that this record does. And then the, the third I would just like broadly point at Allan Holdsworth as an influence of theirs, guitarist from The Soft Machine, and went on to have like– You talked about crazy guitarists.

He’s a crazy guitarist who has… I don’t wanna compare him to Lou Reed, but has like taken on that breadth of stuff that he has done, and he’s had lots of different collaborators. Like he was on a great record with Jean-Luc Ponty in the ’70s, but there’s one record specifically that like the sampling hip-hop whatever guy in me is really into.

The drummer Tony Williams put together a band called the Tony Williams Lifetime, and they put out a record in 1975 called “Believe It” that Allan’s Ho- Allan Holdsworth plays guitar on. So you can do solo Holdsworth, like “Metal Fatigue” from ’85. He had a record in the late ’90s or early 2000s that was like a straight-ahead jazz standards record.

But then there’s stuff like this Tony Williams record where he’s playing with an all-time great drummer and sort of arguably playing circles around him. But it’s always nice to look for things that evoke the sensation that you mentioned a number of times, Cliff, where it’s like people who are individually very good doing the one plus one equals three and somehow becoming even better together than they could in their own thing, ’cause they’re all challenging each other.

Music can be this

Cliff: That makes me throw in one extra of them crooked vultures

Kyle: Oh, God. What a moment that was.

Cliff: Yep. But another pretty good example of just, “Oh, we’re gonna be good at this. Just hold on.” Yeah. Man, I loved all of that. Ultimately, f- thank you everybody for this tour inside of my noggin. In general though, if e- even if you’re having a sort of like “Jesus Christ, why is he like this? I’ve listened to so much about this now.”

Listen man, just that’s fine. Even if this doesn’t connect with you as is, you got something like this, right? Like you got something like this, right? Don’t you? And if you don’t, like try to go find it probably now. If you got something like this, especially that hit you at an important moment in time and it means something to you, you could at minimum honor the spirit of this record, even if you’re not interested in it, by going and finding your version of whatever this is and sitting down and shutting your mouth and listening to it and feeling all the things you used to feel, remembering who you used to be, and thinking about who you’d like to be tomorrow, and thinking about, as they say so aptly, this is all you have when we die.

Like this is it. for me, a significant portion of my existence on planet Earth is tied up in this record and in this band. Like it’s meaningful to me and it lights me up in a great way that has paid off for, you know, decades now. And so I, again, even more so than like I want you to love this record, which I do, please give it a try.

If I have any trust of yours, please try at least once and check this thing out and see what lights you up. But if not, get that other thing that you know lights you up

Kyle: I you to love

something

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: this record.

Cliff: Yes. And then sit and feel and be thankful that every now and then, no matter what happens, something like this exists in our life and we have some form of art that we can not only come back to but that like…

I don’t know. I, I find this to be a beautiful thing that something would be this meaningful to me, and it’s just five dudes, one of whom I’ve been on like a Zoom call with before. Just like there have been moments where like I really wanted to have like a cosmic moment with that dude, just like, “Do you know how important what you did was to me as a person?”

And it’s like that would be way too much. And so o- obviously I didn’t. But like to know that that’s real and that people are on the other side of this going, “Music can be like this. Do you wanna live your life as if music can be like this?” And I’m going, “Yes. Fucking White Walls all day.” Like if you can find something that matches this with anything that you’re feeling or experiencing, I really encourage you to go back to it, uh, and draw from that well again as many times as you can.