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YMMV / Between the Buried and Me

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  • Awesome Music:
    • While the self titled, The Silent Circus, and Coma Ecliptic aren't no slouches, Alaska, Colors, and Parallax II are definitely big highlights in their music catalog.
    • Songwise, it's everywhere, but "Selkies: The Endless Obsession" from Alaska, "Mordecai" from The Silent Circus, and "White Walls" from Colors are sited as prime examples.
    • Even for the Seasonal Rot looked album The Great Misdirect, "Swim to the Moon" is considered a favorite.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The hoedown at the end of "Ants of the Sky."
    • "Bloom". Dear god, "Bloom". Prospect 1 sinks to the bottom of the sea, where his oxygen is removed and he's forced to dance by Queen Sea, the manifestation of the sea, gets his oxygen back, and floats back to the surface. Justified, though, in that it's a flashback to events that took place before the Parallax storyline began.
      • The song also features scat-singing done in Harsh Vocals for even more absurdity.
  • Broken Base:
    • Primarily between the fans of their older, more uniformly metalcore sound on their eponymous debut album and The Silent Circus and the fans of the more progressive and experimental Colors, The Great Misdirect, Hypersleep Dialogues EP, and Future Sequence. Alaska serves as a dividing line and is generally well-liked by both groups. Even the more prog-oriented section of the fanbase seems broken on The Great Misdirect in particular. Depending on who you ask, it's either one of their best albums or one of their worst.
    • Their decision to only play songs from Colors onwards live also brought this about. Some people just saw it as a mere formality based on how little they've been playing earlier material to begin with, understood their reasoning, and had no problem with it, while others were pissed about it and saw it as a slap in the face to older fans (the band did clarify that "Selkies" wasn't going anywhere at the time, while "Mordecai" also continued to get some sporadic playtime). They quietly reversed this in the years following, including, in some cases, even digging up tracks from the self-titled ("More of Myself to Kill"), and their current stance seems to be that they're willing to throw bones to the older fans who grew up on those songs here and there.
    • Fans have also been divided on the Lighter and Softer nature of Coma Ecliptic. Some think it's a great album, while others miss the death metal freakouts from previous albums.
  • Epic Riff: The jam in "Disease, Injury, Madness" has an AMAZING guitar riff driving it forward.
  • Fridge Brilliance: The song title "Silent Flight Parliament" seems like a Word Salad Title... until you remember that a group of owls is referred to as a parliament. And the Night Owls have managed to conceal their plans from humanity...
  • Growing the Beard:
    • TWICE. The self entitled was usual metalcore, but then The Silent Circus showcased the band's rather impressive Mind Screw style in a more prog-like feel. And then was amped up perfectly with Alaska as well, shredding metalcore elements.
    • For many fans, Colors provides either a third example of this or a case of Even Better Sequel, though the division between those two tropes is often nebulous. Of course, it's not a universally held opinion by any means. In any case, Colors established many trends that continue on their records to this day and is pretty frequently considered the record that codified their Signature Style.
  • Hype Backlash: Colors is becoming this for a very Vocal Minority. The backlash on the album stems from the considered "peak" with The Parallax II and especially in regards to Alaska, which they see as overshadowed by the praise Colors gets.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!: Downplayed example, but the most common complaint regarding Automata is the short length of each half. The two records together are only 68:32 long (Automata I is 35:17 and Automata II 33:15) and could easily have fit on a single CD. For comparison, their EP The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues was thirty minutes long. The music has overall been very well received, however; in fact, many fans consider it one of their best releases when taken as a whole.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • WOBSESSION!!!
    • "btbam's suicide note" note 
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • It's raining, It's raining, IT'S RAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIN!
    • Tommy's clean vocals for some, especially how well he can do them.
    • Any time a keyboard comes into play. When it isn't playing Nightmare Fuel at least.
    • Paul Waggoner's vocals in the beginning of "Desert of Song".
    • The slow bits in "Memory Palace".
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • While not a pants pissing band, Between the Buried and Me does have some very creepy moments in their music, in particular Tommy's very chaotic and screechy vocals on The Silent Circus.
    • Both parts of "Lost Perfection" - complete Mind Screw.
      Clowns now appear
      They're carrying knives and jugs of gasoline
      Tonight is our death!
      The clowns being to slash each other...
    • The concept of The Parallax is pretty terrifying in regards of Paranoia Fuel, considering the Night Owls have "worked from here, they have for centuries..."
    • The music video for "The Coma Machine", again an example of the band's Mind Screw elements: A man wakes up in a bed in a warehouse to find his own body in a hospital gurney as he's being monitored by a machine. The rest of the video goes into...weirdness, such as a figure whose face causes the man to recoil in shock, A noose which the man hangs the figure with, and the sole fact the man kills himself by turning off the machine, causing himself to convulse in a creepy manner.
    • "Robotuner" off Alaska. From Tommy's loud as fuck scream and the bizarre lyrics of robots destroying the world (or implied to criticizing the media's destruction of music by popularity) with something like..:
  • Narm:
  • Seasonal Rot: The Great Misdirect often seems to get this treatment from the fans. Many thought the band set the bar too high with Colors and much of the album just sounded like leftovers from the Colors sessions, not offering anything new. This sentiment also extended to Hypersleep Dialogues, which is generally regarded as being vastly weaker than Future Sequence. The Automata albums are also not particularly well-regarded, and the general consensus is that they tried too hard to address the complaints some fans had about the Lighter and Softer turn on Coma Ecliptic, and wound up releasing two very forgettable and unremarkable albums instead. Of course, The Great Misdirect and Hypersleep Dialogues both still have plenty of fans.
  • Signature Song: "Selkies: The Endless Obsession" and "White Walls". Zigzagged in that while they are their most famous and recognizable songs, their live appearances are becoming increasingly sparse and the band has made it very clear that they're sick of them.
  • Tough Act to Follow: The general consensus agrees that The Great Misdirect isn't a bad album, and actually has one of the band's best known songs (specifically "Swim to the Moon"). Same can be said with Coma Ecliptic which came after the incredibly hyped and praised The Parallax II: Future Sequence. Ironically, this has been completely averted with Colors II, which has managed to garner almost as much praise as the album it's a sequel to.
  • Tear Jerker:
  • Vindicated by History: The Parallax II: Future Sequence was very polarizing upon release, being seen as either their best album since Colors or one of their worst albums and a further descent into the Seasonal Rot started by The Great Misdirect. But in the years since, reception towards it from the fans has been more positive, often seen as one of their most consistent and satisfying records and one of their most mature and fully realized works. It helps that the band have stood by it, and the decision to play the album in its entirety a second time in 2023 (a full ten years after the initial tour) to celebrate its 10th anniversary has certainly helped, with the initial tour for said album considered to be one of the band's best tours.
  • Win Back the Crowd: Colors II has overall been their best-received album since The Parallax II, somehow decisively averting Sequelitis and Tough Act to Follow.

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