Between the Buried and Me with Deafheaven Concert Report

Between the Buried and Me with Deafheaven at the Phoenix February 28

Deafheaven

This was only my third proper metal show after seeing Dillinger Escape Plan and later Opeth with Mastodon. I was initially more excited to see Deafheaven since they've gotten tonnes of great reviews and even made the cover of Now magazine in Toronto. Deafheaven play a blend of black metal and shoegaze that is like catnip for music critics. Having extremely long songs, they played only four songs with three brief interludes. I was a bit disappointed because the only song from the awesome Sunbather album that they didn't play was "Vertigo", which is my favorite. They sounded very impressive live though. While their wall of noise was quite similar to the album, the addition of a full band created a bigger, more powerful effect. The song "Sunbather" was particularly stunning. They maintained a solid balance between black metal screaming and melodic, almost sunny guitar lines. The singer had a looming, energetic and vaguely frightening presence that made up for the lack of variety in his vocal delivery. The mixing was successful in that the singing felt like another guitar part, as it should with a band like this. For both bands, the crowd's enthusiasm was hugely invigorating.

Between the Buried and Me

Between the Buried and Me, despite their questionable, Counting Crows-derived name, were definitely the more impressive of the two bands offering a fusion of technical death metal and prog-pop. I recently discovered the distinction between black and death metal. Black metal has higher pitched screaming vocals with fairly steady, consistent rhythms while death metal involves lower-pitched, growling vocals combined with frequent time changes. It was interesting seeing examples of both, with Deafheaven representing the former and Between the Buried and Me the latter. BtBaM (or maybe just BBM?) fairly boldly decided to make their main set consist only of their newest album, The Parallax II: Future Sequence. Luckily, it's a quite good album that represents a wide variety of sounds. As well, this gave the set an amazing flow as the songs segue nicely into one another. The band's technical skill was clearly through the roof, being able to switch from one genre to another at the drop of a hat. The best example of this was "Bloom", which in three minutes captured everything the band is good at. They encored with "Sun of Nothing" from Circles, a triumphant finale and likely their best song.