Review Summary: The album that killed Pink Floyd
The most important thing to understand when listening to Colors is that Tommy Rogers is ultimately a nice man. However, almost as important is that this album is the reason Pink Floyd would released Dark Side of the Moon. Now, before you call me out for talking a complete load of bull****, let me explain. The aim of Dark Side of the Moon was not to be a classic album that people would enjoy for generations to come. This would have been the case if it had been made by a mediocre band, but you have to remember that Roger Waters was a member of Pink Floyd (and, as rumour has it, so was the 12 year old Dave Mustaine, but that's another story). Roger's primary goal was world dominion, but realizing that this would never truely satisfy him, he settled with his next best target; he wanted to release an album so influential that legions of ****ty bands would be inspired by it and try unsucessfully to copy, reinvent and not subconciously imitate, so that he could laugh hysterically at their abysmal failures whilst smashing copies of the Division Bell with a daedric warhammer. Now, before Colors was released, this had happened quite a lot; look at Steven Wilson, Drew Speziale and Lord Worm for some prime examples of Floyd imitators. However, none of these fuelled Roger's lolcounter quite as much as Between the Buried and Me's Colors.
If you have already heard Colors, then you probably already understand why I've made this point, but for the benefit of myself, and other people who haven't yet listened to Colors, I'll explain. Every single moment in this album corresponds to a moment in Dark Side of the Moon, whether it's the solo in Time being shamelessly emulated for about 5 seconds in between two blitzes of wankery in Sun of Nothing, the hilarious similarity between the ambient passage in White Walls and the entirety of On the Run or the fact that Informal Gluttony is played exactly in time with Speak to Me, this album is a lamentably unsubtle reinvention of Pink Floyd's classic album.
However, the blantant Floyd ripoffs are not the only problem with this album. The worst thing about it is that as opposed to merely stealing ideas from Pink Floyd, as so many bands have done (e.g. Dream Theater, Neurosis, Meshuggah, Bjork and other artists in a similar vein to these fauxprog bastards) Between the Buried and Me attempt to modernize it and sell it out to the masses as if it was still the 70s. This is most clearly seen in the artwork, which not only features the colour spectrum as seen on the DSotM artwork, but also a 21st century cityscape. In commercializing their sound like this, Between the Buried and Me lose all the musical integrity that they might have retained if they had merely created Colors as a tribute to Pink Floyd; their attempt to reach out of their trusted scene fanbase and touch the hearts of every kid on the street (after all, the blast beats used in this album are undistinguishable from those used so frequently in modern hip-hop) automatically condemns then to the worst kind of musical hell; the realm where offenders such as Jacob Bannon, Jonathon Davies, Tanner Weed and AubergineDreams will one day reside in for the rest of time, where they will shut in a room with nothing to do but listen to their own music.
So, Mr Waters has had his joke, and Colors is now almost as passé as the Toby Benson band ("Who?" I hear you ask. Let's just say that they had over 10 number 1 singles in the UK during the 70s and now nobody knows who they are), but where does that leave us now? Does this album still have any significance? Will we one day understand the true meaning behind drummer Blake Richardson's decision to fall into bed with singer Tommy Roger's wife, to whom she had been married only a fortnight? Will Roger Waters perhaps decide to sue all the bands who stole his band's ideas and use the millions that he makes to colonize a faraway planet with his loyal fans, where he will raise an army of undead over a few years, before returning to earth to bring about the apocalypse?
Find the answers in the next installment of Damn! That was a cluster****: The Truth Behind Mikael Akerfeldt's hair and how it inspired Glassjaw.
