End To End

"The first shows were pretty rough,” admits Blake Richardson, talking about the challenges of playing an album as dense and complex as The Parallax II live. “I'm not a big 'cardio' guy, but playing drums for [90 minutes] every night has taken care of my exercise!

“[There have] been a couple other things I've had to personally overcome as well... One obstacle in particular is that since we have reoccurring musical themes it's hard to decipher where you are at some points in the set. For example, in Telos, there's a marching band drum break toward the beginning of the track. We bring the percussive theme of this section back in the song Silent Flight Parliament. The challenge is that I moved around a few notes during the writing process to give a 'hint' of sorts that references the original theme. So remembering which one is which during a long set can sometimes get confusing.”

According to Richardson, the whole process of transposing the entirety of the record into the live setting has been difficult for the guys. But it's something they set out to do when writing The Parallax II: Future Sequence, and Between The Buried & Me are a band that achieves what it sets out to.

“We knew that while we were writing, if the album was going to be one long cohesive piece, that we should at least attempt to play the entire thing live. We had done the same thing when we recorded Colors. We just said, 'Hey, it'd be cool if we just played this whole record straight through… for a whole tour!' And that's what we did for Parallax II.”

Revisiting the album's narrative night after night has also been rewarding for Between The Buried & Me. Richardson reckons touring the Parallax material has even inspired the band to think about where else they could possibly take the story. “Playing this material live has definitely sparked some inspiration as far as the story is concerned. It's way down the road at this point, but we've been toying with the idea of continuing the story somehow, or maybe even doing some kind of a prequel.

“We've already started getting riffs together. We have one more tour for the Parallax cycle planned. Then after that, we are going to start writing again… But I honestly have no clue what the record will be like as far as material is concerned. I personally would like to have a little bit more fun with this next record, similar to what we did with The Great Misdirect. When we wrote that record we had just gotten done touring off of Colors. So we just wanted to have no rules. So I am thinking that's the direction we are going to go in.” Then Richardson adds, “as if we wouldn't do that anyways!”