Between the Buried and Me at Irving Plaza

Tommy Rogers

After the 2000 demise of their metalcore band Prayer for Cleansing, vocalist/keyboardist Tommy Rogers and guitarist Paul Waggoner formed a new band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Between the Buried and Me was named from a lyric in a Counting Crows song, "Ghost Train." Stabilizing its lineup in 2005, Between the Buried and Me presently consists of Rogers, Waggoner, guitarist Dustie Waring, bassist Dan Briggs and drummer Blake Richardson. The band's seventh studio album, Coma Ecliptic, was released on July 10, 2015.

Headlining at Irving Plaza tonight, Between the Buried and Me performed its brand of progressive metal, which took complex compositions from technical metal arcs and death metal grinds to jazz interludes. The band opened with "The Coma Machine" from the most current album, a science fiction opus which explores the dilemma of a man in a coma revisiting his past life and deliberating whether to stay or move on to a better life. If the concept alone was not mind-bending enough, the staggering tempos in the songs were prepared to complete the job. The band performed fan favorites from several albums, but the novices to this music may have been profoundly challenged to follow the jarring rhymes and reasons. That these diverse movements and musical styles could be performed together at all was very impressive.

Visit Between the Buried and Me at www.betweentheburiedandme.com.