Six songs, one hour — following the unfollowable. The Great Misdirect is the fifth album by Between the Buried and Me, the record that had to come after Colors, and it answers that challenge by going even longer, closing with the eighteen-minute epic that remains their longest song.

The short version

The fifth studio album by the North Carolina band Between the Buried and Me, recorded in the summer of 2009 and released that October on Victory Records; just six tracks, spread across almost an hour. Rather than repeat the seamless single-piece structure of Colors, it works as a set of long, self-contained journeys, with far more room given to instrumental sections and soloing. It closes with Swim to the Moon, at eighteen minutes the longest thing the band has ever recorded. Ambitious and much loved by many, though more divisive than its predecessor.

Following the unfollowable

Colors had been a landmark, and the obvious trap was to make it again. The band avoided that: The Great Misdirect keeps the same sound and the same production team, with Jamie King back at the Winston-Salem studio they had used since the start, but abandons the continuous, uninterrupted structure in favour of six long, separate compositions. Recorded across a month in mid-2009, it also reflects the company they had been keeping: extensive touring alongside Dream Theater pushed the group toward longer instrumental passages and more soloing, with Tommy Rogers content to sit back and concentrate on keyboards for longer stretches than before. A four-minute teaser of clips appeared online at the end of August, the single Obfuscation followed in September, and Rogers called the material some of the strongest the band had written.

The sound

The familiar Between the Buried and Me palette, given more room to stretch. Technical death metal riffing, blast beats and Tommy Rogers moving between growls and clean singing are still the foundation, and the stylistic swerves are as wide as ever, taking in jazz, country, ragtime-flavoured interludes and long ambient stretches. What changes is the balance: instrumental sections are longer and more prominent, guitar solos are given real space, and Dan Briggs’s bass steps forward with a fluidity that recalls jazz fusion as much as metal. The songs build patiently toward large melodic crescendos rather than lurching between extremes, which makes the album feel less frantic than Colors and more like a series of extended journeys. For some that patience is its strength; for others it tips into aimlessness.

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The songs

Six tracks, four of them substantial. Mirrors is a short, moody opener in shifting time, building straight into Obfuscation, a nine-minute piece of ever-changing technical metal with bright guitar melodies, a memorable chorus and a wild solo. The third track is the one many name as the album’s best, opening in ferocity, settling into something sublime and then unfolding as a long progressive roller coaster with some of the finest guitar solos the band had recorded. Fossil Genera and its subtitle A Feed From Cloud Mountain is another twelve-minute journey, while Desert of Song offers a laid-back, country-tinged breather. Then comes Swim to the Moon, eighteen minutes long, ending almost abruptly and leaving the sense of more to come.

Reception and legacy

The Great Misdirect was well received, though inevitably measured against Colors, and remains one of the band’s most argued-over albums. Its champions consider it their finest work, praising the ambition, the melodic crescendos, the guitar solos and Swim to the Moon as the equal of anything on Colors. Its critics find stretches of aimless riffing, feel that the eighteen-minute finale could have been trimmed by a third, and judge it a step down from the record before. What almost everyone agrees on is that the band were right not to attempt a sequel, and that its patient, solo-heavy approach opened a path the group would keep exploring. A rewarding album that asks for attention.

The verdict

An ambitious, sprawling, much-debated follow-up, and the album that proved Between the Buried and Me would not simply repeat themselves — six long compositions with far more room for instrumental exploration than before. Come to it for the third track and its extraordinary guitar solos, the nine-minute Obfuscation and the eighteen-minute closer Swim to the Moon, rather than for the seamless flow of Colors. Give it patience. From here, Colors for the masterpiece it follows, and Coma Ecliptic for the melodic turn that came next. A big, generous, divisive record.

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