Between the Buried and Me - The Parallax II: Future Sequence
Y’know, it’s not like I expected a band this talented, imaginative, and Prog-obsessed to start kicking out the 3-minute Nirvana jams upon signing to Metal Blade last year, but I also didn’t expect this. I suppose I was just hopeful for a combination of the experimental flow of Colors and the more palatable anthems of the Alaska/Silent Circus era finely honed into a compact Metallic weapon. This is just errant creative diarrhea. In all my years of doing this, The Parallax II might very well be the most unreviewable album I’ve ever encountered. It’s essentially the same approach as last year’s precursor, the Hypersleep Dialogues EP, but those three cuts were more fluent with a much more realistic serving size. This bitch is 73 minutes long. I’m at a point in life where I don’t need anything to last 73 minutes. Not even fun stuff. Not sex, not a roller coaster ride, not a buzz, not a workout, not a massage… I don’t even wanna have to drive that long. Nothing short of a good movie, baseball game, or the ultimate career-spanning Katatonia live set needs to last 73 minutes. Shit, I can remember nights I didn’t sleep that long! Aside from lone album standout “Astral Body” and wacky circus-freak ditty “Bloom,” this LP only has two types of tracks: sub-2-minute intros/interludes/segues and 10-minute batshit insane marathons. Now, I’m no BtBaM novice. I’m well aware they’ve always had a penchant for epic-length songs. But they were good epic-length songs. These songs have 10,000,000 parts for the sake of having 10,000,000 parts. With a 7-page outline, I might be able to diagram the blocks and sub-blocks of this album that I find enjoyable, or at best tolerable, but forget about a traditional review. I could listen to this everyday for the rest of my life and still not be able to dissect it on paper. It’s too schizophrenic, too bipolar, too ADHD… clearly someone’s not taking their meds. This is a Grateful Dead concert on steroids. Total Prog overdose. I wanted Rock ‘n’ Roll and I got advanced nuclear physics. Just as an experiment, these guys should ditch the music biz for a couple years and get soul-crushing 9-5 jobs. See if they feel like listening to this jumbled chaotic mess for over an hour when they get home. Future Sequence is a Promethean roadblock on an otherwise worthwhile discography, and I fear it will only get worse. It’s just a matter of time before they go total Zappa. No thanks.
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