Buried Alive - The Death of Your Perfect World (1999)If you have taken even the slightest step into the modern world of punk and hardcore, you have heard of Terror. Vocalist Scott Vogel is one of the most recognizable frontmen in hardcore; his unbridled passion for the genre and sense of humor (in the form of his trademark “Vogelisms” - look them up) make the band’s live show something to behold. His passion for hardcore didn’t just come from anywhere; and Terror, while Vogel’s most successful and prolific band, was not his first. Vogel was originally in Slugfest and later Despair, two bands that took the patented New York hardcore style of the late ’80s and early ’90s and experimented with more groove and metallic influences. When both bands fell through, Vogel formed Buried Alive with some of his peers from the Buffalo scene. While still rooted in a hardcore sound, this new band took cues from the more dissonant hardcore bands that were popular at the time, like Converge, Turmoil, and Snapcase, and soon enough, the band signed to the now-infamous Victory Records and released their magnum opus The Death of Your Perfect World in 1999. The band’s most notable musical quality is the incorporation of dissonant leads and chords within a crushingly heavy, hardcore-rooted sound. Dissonance was nothing new the metalcore by 1999, but Buried Alive were one of the first to foreground it in their songwriting and tap into its versatility. The breakdown on “Watching You Die” is as brutal as its title, sounding like something ripped from a Converge record thanks to its plentiful use of dissonance, but the lightly picked minor-second lead on “Kill Their Past” presents the technique in a different light, using it to create an unsettling sonic aura that was fairly innovative at the time of The Death of Your Perfect World’s release. Many bands over the years have tried to write a record that is a lesson in nonstop punishment and brutality, but The Death of Your Perfect World is a cut above thanks to Buried Alive’s experimentation. It’s absolutely relentless in the way that every riff seems to lead into the next without sounding samey or contrived--case in point, the seamless transition into the two-step in the middle of opener “Watching You Die.” It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to yell Vogel’s lyrics right back at him before the song shifts and you’re suddenly picking it up. The breakdown on “Empty Sky” feels like it comes out of nowhere with little to no build-up, a trope that plagues many bands playing this style of metalcore, but that Buried Alive turn into a strength: its abruptness makes you want to perform horrific acts of physical violence to the person next to you, which is what a good breakdown should do. Buried Alive’s diverse sound, relative to other “tough guy” hardcore like Hatebreed, allowed them to tour with an equally diverse range of bands during their time together. One weekend they could be on a show with bands like All Out War and Skarhead, and playing with Zao and Nora the next. They’ve shared the stage with bands that sound almost nothing like them, such as H2O, Hot Water Music, and Kid Dynamite. In the world we live in, where mixed bills are becoming more and more common, this might be taken for granted; I obviously wasn’t around back when Buried Alive were playing shows with these bands, but I’m sure that their open-mindedness toward playing shows with bands from virtually every hardcore and metalcore niche must have been a key factor in their popularity. Lyrically, the record isn’t too out of this world, but Vogel’s bluntness and carefully directed anger makes them manage to not sound as “tough guy” as one would expect. “Six Month Face” is a great example: directly calling out those who only spend their time within the hardcore scene until they eventually tire of it, lyrics like “slowly shed your skin / convictions fucking fade / another six month face / inside you’re dead,” delivered in Vogel’s larynx-shredding scream, come from a place of righteous indignation a little more grounded in reality than the sort of empty posturing that’s always plagued hardcore lyricism. To some, these lines may come across no less goofy than your average hardcore proclamation, but the music goes a long way in convincing the listener that Vogel’s sentiment comes from the heart. As someone who got into metalcore and hardcore well after Buried Alive’s time, their reunion set at this year’s This Is Hardcore is extremely exciting, but it’s hard not to imagine the heights Buried Alive could have reached had they not left as quickly as they arrived. On an episode of Shane Told’s (of Silverstein fame) podcast, Lead Singer Syndrome, Scott Vogel attributed personal differences towards his decision to leave the band (and Buffalo) following a tour with Death Threat, which led to Vogel moving to Los Angeles and founding Terror. So, while Vogel is not wanting for a successful career in music, given the band’s diversity and Victory Records’s prominence in the ’00s, it’s not a huge stretch to say that Buried Alive could have been as big as a Hatebreed or a Killswitch Engage, if not at the very least bigger than Terror is now. The last line of the last song on the record, “To Live and Die With,” rings eerily true: “we are our own disease / and we will never be what we could be.” Buried Alive may have never become the band that they could have been, but as long as kids continue to shed their six-month faces and explore the roots of the music they love, there will always be a place for them in hardcore. -Cesar G.
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