Closing a diptych is always a perilous exercise: you must both justify the initial split and deliver a conclusion that stands on its own. Automata II pulls it off with flying colors, even though it bears the marks of a concept conceived in two stages rather than in a single continuous breath. Where the first part established a tighter, almost anxiety-inducing atmosphere, this sequel allows itself broader detours, as if the band had kept its most audacious ideas up its sleeve for this second installment.
Voum, or the art of the extreme split
The track that opens the record perfectly illustrates what makes Between the Buried and Me’s strength (and sometimes its limitation): an ability to make hunted growls, almost pop-like clear arpeggios and rhythmic breaks that seem to defy all classical composition logic coexist within the same title. The clear voice of the singer, always so recognizable in its melancholic inflections, comes to ease passages of technical death metal with remarkable density. We sometimes think of a band entertaining itself dismantling and reassembling its own music before our eyes, never losing the narrative thread that runs through the entire record.
Clairvoyance, the album’s peak
It’s undoubtedly in the longest passages that the band convinces the most. The guitarists deploy melodic lines that wrap around a supple rhythm, carried by a bass that never merely follows but genuinely dialogues with the other instruments. The drummer, for his part, continues to impose a game of surgical precision, capable of shifting from a muted jazz groove to a full-on double bass pedal within a few measures. There is in these passages a form of grace that transcends mere technical display, a real dramatic tension that holds the track together over its duration.
The flip side of this ambition is a production that favors clarity and instrument separation at the expense of a certain organic brutality. Everything sounds clean, sometimes too polished for a band that prides itself on coming from death metal originally. The growls, well present, sometimes seem confined within too neat a frame, as if the mix was afraid to let aggression spill over. It’s an aesthetic choice coherent with the progressive dimension they claim, but one that may leave hungry those expecting a more frontal assault after the rawer opening of the first chapter.
Two halves, a single organism
Listened to following the first opus, Automata II takes on its full meaning: melodic motifs return, transformed, themes answer each other from one record to the other with a coherence that commands respect. Taken in isolation, it loses some of this cumulative power, certain tracks seeming to call for a resolution that only comes if you know the first part. It is at once the richness and fragility of the project: a work conceived as a whole, difficult to fully appreciate in fragments. What remains is a dense, demanding record that confirms the band continues to explore the margins of its own language without ever resting on its laurels, even if it sometimes loses frontal impact for what it gains in sophistication.
