By Mark Derricutt

Artist: Between The Buried And Me

Date / Venue: Sunday February 21st, 2016 - Kings Arms, Auckland

I can still remember the first time I heard BTBAM - and I was not all that impressed. I LOVED my thrash and death metal, and I adored my progressive rock and power metal, and I was knee deep in a process of discovering Kraut rock and the strange world of psychadelic/stoner music - what I wasn’t quite ready for was the melding and mixing of almost every genre I love into one giant melting pot - but that’s what BTBAM was.

It wasn’t until 2005’s Alaska that we were ready for each other - we’d both evolved musically and finally we were in a place that just sat well together so it’s awesome to hear we were to be hearing material from this album on this tour.

The evening started with a trio of Auckland's finest - Seasons, Helgorithms, and the ever popular Heavy Metal Ninjas - as each band played their sets the venue progressively filled up but still leaving room to move around ( the summer eve was already hot enough - a body squashed venue would have made things unbearable).

BTBAM arrived on stage and opened the evening with 'The Coma Machine' - the opening track from the new album 'Coma Ecliptic' - a nice mellow piano ditty that breaks way into chaotic insanity - what was once a calm ocean of bodies was now a torrent of swirling and moving bodies and frenetic energy. As I was pulling dual duty this evening photographing the band I clung to the front stage fold back speakers for dear life as band and audience alike where flung around like an ocean liner in a superstorm.

As the evening progressed I continued having flashbacks back to 2012’s performance at the same venue and again remember how awe inspiring it is to see a band switch casually, and gracefully from death growls and metal core to clean vocals and commercial sounding rock and shifting all the way between with seemingly little to no effort.

BTBAM are a band not to miss - musically they may not be everyones cup of tea - but what a performance.

Set list:

- The Coma Machine
- Foam Born
- Telos
- Shevanel Cut A Flip
- The Ectopic Stroll
- Mirrors
- Obfuscation
- Famine Wolf
- Selfies