Progressive metal band Between the Buried and Me are currently touring their album Parallax ll: Future Sequence and performed at the Plaza Live in Orlando on Tuesday night. The Safety Fire, Contortionist, and The Faceless accompanied the band during the evening.
The Plaza Live was completely full of young men and women dressed in black shirts. The room became hot as the audience stood shoulder to shoulder and a mosh pit erupted in the middle of the room. The energy in the room swelled and calmed as the opening bands played their sets. When Between the Buried and Me took the stage the crowd erupted with excitement.
The performance was an incredible display of technical precession as the band played their newest album from start to finish, an album that is longer than an hour. The music was a symphony of odd time signatures, sudden tempo shifts, melodic movements, and thrashing bursts of screaming energy.
I stood in front of the bands lead guitar player, Paul Waggoner, as he focused intently on the music and raised the occasional victory fist following a particularly complex portion of the album.
When the band finished the applause was thunderous since the performance was essentially one long song that changed and morphed through different movements. The band emerged and played a one-song encore of White Walls, the closing track from their album Colors. During the 14-minute long song I abandoned my place at the stage front in favor of joining the tumultuous mosh-pit. The experience was exhilarating and the audience was more than satisfied.