Album Review

For seven or eight years, Buried Inside have plied their controlled aggression, first in their hometown of Ottawa and slowly spreading their name and ridiculously loud live show around Ontario before branching out into cross-Canada tours and US treks. Sound familiar? Substitute your city for ‘Ottawa‘ and you have a story told hundreds of times over - but Buried Inside are an exception, as they stuck it out for years before finally getting their due: a worldwide record deal with Relapse, a monolith of a record company who have the resources to send BI into the stratosphere.

The old Buried Inside material, from early demos through to 2001‘s full-length Suspect Symmetry, pales in comparison to Chronoclast. Vocalist/lyricist Nick Shaw has always been super-cerebral and articulate, and the band‘s wrecking of stages was always consistent, but this time out the band had the know-how and people to craft a truly brilliant album. Guided by the sure hand of producer Matt Bayles and featuring a couple of skilled guests, Chronoclast blows the mind, expanding it with a stronger sense of melody throughout than Buried used to show while combining atmospherics with pure, adrenalized heaviness. It‘s hard to discuss this album as anything other than a whole, as Shaw has constructed six lyrical tracks (there are ten overall) around the concept of time and how it‘s been co-opted for gain by political and religious factions. I‘m not gonna lie and say I fully comprehend Shaw‘s polemics, but they‘re educational in and of themselves, and the fact that so much thought and conviction went into them raises the bar for heavy, cathartic bands, a lot of whom are already known for smarts.

Musically, everything is almost perfect for Buried Inside‘s dark-sounding epics; Steve Martin‘s bass, unlike their last album, is clear and audible, sometimes taking the lead melody while the rest gear up for the next onslaught. The sense of being lulled prevails, from the almost-menacing strings to the open warfare - ‘Time As Methodology‘ and ‘Time As Surrogate Religion‘ exemplify Buried‘s new, more streamlined sound, while ‘Time As Imperialism‘ (see the trend here?) showcases Martin‘s bass leading some cello action while Shaw screams himself hoarse in the deep, deep background Drummer Mike Godbout is an absolute animal, as the intro to ‘Time As Abjection‘ tears your head off with the blastbeats, and the twin guitars soar, chug, slice...the adjectives could go on. Headphone listening reveals how the guitars truly interact, and it‘s very impressive. ‘Surrogate Religion‘ and ‘Imperialism‘ stand out as the centrepiece of Chronoclast, with their medieval-choir vocals and countermelodies, but there is not a song here that doesn‘t stand and deliver in its own right. Agree or disagree with Buried Inside‘s stances(and please, do read the lyrics and educate yourself), but they will be heard, in the end, above a large chunk of their peers.

[Buried Inside] [Relapse Records]

- Mike Postma

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