Colours and Misdirection

Everything’s a novelty…
Everyone grows but me…

:::Rant ahead:::

Waiting for Between the Buried and Me’s The Great Misdirect to be released this last few months has been the only time in my life I’ve ever actually been counting days until a records release. The effect that their last album left on me was far greater than it probably should have been- but so different and new was the kind of music to me that I couldn’t help but fall instantly in love with it. Colours is an album I still listen to on a very regular basis, and I’m yet to grow tired of it- it holds so many memories of happier times- the first time I listened to White Walls in September of 2007 I was on the bus to town to meet up with Kara, a little over two months into our relationship. Although those carefree times have long since passed and been replaced with more complicated, dull, tedious stages of my life, one would think that listening to White Walls nowadays would only serve to make me feel miserable about my life today (not that there’s really anything to be miserable about). On the contrary, listening to it has the opposite effect- the final seven minutes of White Walls remains some of my favourite music ever, and listening to it makes me realise how much things have changed in those two years- for better and for worse.

I guess what I’m trying to get across is that Colours is an album I hold very dear, for more reasons than one. While many were quick to call it an oddly-paced mess of genres, for me it was a very different and welcome musical experience, and one I won’t soon forget.

Slide into the water,
become one with the sea.
Life seems so much smaller,
swim to the moon.

Naturally when I heard earlier this year that Between the Buried and Me were working on a follow-up titled The Great Misdirect, I was excited. I was unsure whether it would be better than Colours- but I didn’t really care. Anything that continued in the musical direction that Colours went in was fine by me. A few weeks ago, I woke up one Thursday morning before Tafe and checked up on my RSS feeds on my iPhone (inb4 smart-ass comments from Jess) and found the album had been leaked. My internet had never seemed slower than when I was downloading The Great Misdirect that morning- probably because I needed to catch a bus in 6 minutes and the download was scheduled to take 9.

Eh, it’s only music, I’ll download it later a bus, I’ll catch the next one. The day was going to hold a lot of aimless wandering for me, so I’d rather have some new music to do it with. I lovingly ignored John on the bus ride to the city that morning and instead cranked the volume on my iPhone and listened to The Great Misdirect. So is it better than Colours?

In a nutshell: no.

That isn’t to say it’s bad though- it’s actually a fantastic album- a lot of the better elements of Colours were revisited and expanded upon, and a few of the tracks are amazing (Fossil Genera, Swim to the Moon), but I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I haven’t listened to it a hundred times yet, but it just doesn’t seem to have that certain something that made Colours so special to me. I can’t really describe it. I’d say I’m disappointed, but that would only be half true. It’s no Colours, but it’s an amazing album nonetheless. It shifts moods and genres in a similar way Colours, but it all seems so much more coherent and natural. The shift from honky-tonk piano to heavy guitar and double bass riffs and then down to gentle acoustics feels so damn natural- which is impressive given the usual kind of music the band plays. The last few minutes of Fossil Genera- A Feed From Cloud Mountain I think might be some of the best music the band has yet produced and yet it’s so radically different from their usual kind of music. The ending of the song builds up and winds down in a very similar manner to White Walls did and would have made a much stronger final track than Swim to the Moon was- which was fantastic, but it ended far too suddenly.

Here, we’re awake in the Desert of Song,
Silence broken, here we’re awake and the
silence is broken, silence is broken.

So what am I trying to get across with this stupid disjointed rant? Nothing. Shut your mouth. The Great Misdirect is an amazing album, but in my humble opinion, not as good as Colours. That’s it. I don’t feel like writing any more. If you read this, then kudos to you!