Between The Buried And Me guitarist Paul Waggoner was asked to rank the band’s studio albums in a recent feature for Noisey. You can find his choices, along with his reasoning for each ranking over at the aforementioned site. You can also take in the list of his choices and a few excerpts below:
07. “The Silent Circus”
06. “Between The Buried And Me”
05. “Alaska”
04. “The Great Misdirect”
03. “Colors”
02. “The Parallax II: Future Sequence”
01. “Coma Ecliptic”
Waggoner goes on to offer the reasoning and insight behind each of his choices in the feature, some highlights include:
On “Colors“:
“I think it’s probably the most important record of our career, in terms of establishing the sound we built on with the last few records. It was an album where we had just done Ozzfest, which was very uninspiring for us. It was that tour where we discovered, “Wait, we don’t fit in with these types of bands. This isn’t the type of music that we want to play or that we do play.” So Colors was us throwing caution to the wind and being like, “Let’s just do exactly what we feel like doing.”
We didn’t really know how it would be received, and even when we were writing it, I think there was a little bit of tension within the band, like, “Wait a minute, are we screwing up here? Are we doing something that’s gonna ruin our career?” At the same time, we were so motivated to separate ourselves a little bit from the pack in the metal and hardcore world, so we just went for it. We wrote really long frickin’ songs, we wrote a lot of stuff that was musically conceptual.
We were really trying to push ourselves to do something that, in our opinion, hadn’t really been done before in the context of hardcore and heavy metal. I think for those reasons it was a big risk for us and very fortunately it panned out. It’s allowed us to do what we do now and I think it was a huge, pivotal moment for us in our career where we figured out, “Hey, we’re supposed to be a band that writes music like this.”
On choosing “Coma Ecliptic” as #1:
“…I genuinely feel like it’s our best. I think we, as musicians, have gotten better and become better songwriters. I think we’ve gotten better at orchestrating the instruments. I think ‘Coma Ecliptic‘ is us figuring out how to sound, figuring out how to make the music we want to make and making it work pretty much flawlessly. I don’t really have any complaints about that album.
I feel like it’s the most mature album, and the duration of the band’s lifetime all kind of led up to that. I think that’s the pinnacle. I think we finally did what we wanted to do. So yeah, I think it’s the best one we’ve written. Nobody’s trying to prove a point, we’re not trying to out-shred everybody, and we’re not trying to write the most complicated stuff in the world—we’re just trying to write really cool music that showcases all of our creativity and where all of us are as musicians.
It’s a really good display of all of our influences coming together, creating something super-duper focused and cohesive, and it sounds really good. I think we dialed it in from a production standpoint as well; just all these little detail things that took 15 years to figure out—I think we finally figured them out with this album.”
For the full feature, head to Noisey.
Comments