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Invisible Oranges TV #1: Between the Buried and Me

Invisible Oranges TV #1: Between the Buried and Me

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Here’s an experiment: Invisible Oranges TV. I’m not sure where it will go, but it will involve better production values than “me stumbling through Windows Live Movie Maker”. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel if you’d like to keep up with IO TV that way.

Between the Buried and Me might seem like a strange choice with which to start things off. I myself took a few years off from listening to BTBAM. When Colors came out in ’07, I remember putting it on, thinking, “This has way too many notes”, and shelving it. The band didn’t change; I did. And as I age, I’ll probably continue gravitating towards music with fewer, not more notes. (Well, except for Origin – I want to hear every one of those ten million notes. All hail ridiculous shredmasters Ryan and Longstreth!)

But out of curiosity, I listened to BTBAM’s new record, The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues. Indeed, it had a shitload of notes. I didn’t mind, though, and hearing actual musical colors was a nice change from my usual diet of goat/Satan metal. (The record was also a good reminder for me to revisit old King Crimson.) And while it’s jarring for me to see the Invisible Oranges logo next to a clean-cut young man in a V-neck t-shirt (bassist Dan Briggs), that young man is in a successful band, and success interests me.

So in the interview – conducted by Julia Neuman and filmed and edited by Peter Leininger – we find out that BTBAM played Colors in its 65-minute entirety about 70 times live. That’s a long time to play technically demanding music. But the band embraced the challenge – and pushed itself afterwards. The phrase in the interview that jumped out at me was “organic and natural”. For most of us, “organic and natural” is a section of the grocery store. For BTBAM, it means thousands of notes and songs that could go anywhere. That’s what these guys do. They’ve found their “thing”.

Recently I heard a BTBAM clone, which astounded me, since I didn’t think the band could be copied. But it eventually made sense to me. You know you have a “thing” when people start copying you. They want to freeload off what you’ve built. If what you build is unique enough, it won’t be for everyone. But if you what you build is strong enough, those who like it will really like it. And that’s the case for BTBAM, who’ve grown a devoted fan base by sticking to their guns of, to put it bluntly, wacky music. Sometimes I dig it, and sometimes I don’t, but absolutely do I respect it. Most bands – and people – never find their “thing”. BTBAM have found it, and then some. Shred on, clean-cut young men.

— Cosmo Lee

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Julia’s live review of BTBAM

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