Between the Influences and Me

North Carolina’s Between the Buried and Me are currently enjoying a long and fruitful residency in the upper echelons of progressive metal. Known for playing a smorgasbord of musical genres at a mind-bogglingly high level of musicianship, BTBAM have spawned a legion of fans with their ambitiously composed, flawless performed releases, among them Alaska, Colors, and The Great Misdirect. However, anyone who has spent time with BTBAM knows that the band tend to blast through their genre-chameleonry at full speed and volume, rarely allowing the listener to catch their breath, and never letting a stray note fall out of place. This can make their albums feel like kinetically thrilling epic journeys, or frenetically exhausting information overloads, depending on who you ask.

Enter Tommy Giles Rogers Jr., whose parched howls, gentle croons and tasteful keyboard textures serve as the mediating force between BTBAM’s wild technicality and their story-craving audience. With Modern Noise, Rogers’ second full-length album under the Thomas Giles moniker, fans have the chance to see what kind of music Rogers likes to make on his own. However, what they’ll find here may shock and even upset them – for Modern Noise presents Thomas Giles as a musician still whipping in the winds of his influences, working without a core sonic identity and grasping at ephemera that mostly seem to elude him.

To be clear, Giles is not a rock ’n’ roll “song guy.” You know – one of those fellows who is as comfortable alone behind a guitar as they are with a full band, penning ditty after ditty as naturally as can be (Jack White and Ty Segall come to mind). Thomas Giles is not a master electronic orchestrator either, and on Modern Noise, Giles’ compositions exist in some nebulous space between, hoping perhaps to land in a fertile Radiohead-esque province. However, it soon becomes apparent that Giles doesn’t have a fully-developed songwriting methodology (and who can blame him, after a dozen years of BTBAM’s curated attention deficit disorder), and thus the songs on Modern Noise tend to drift into awkwardness, mediocrity and even boredom.

“Mutilated World” is an early push track from the album. Seemingly inspired in equal parts by poet Adam Zagajewski and English rock band Muse, the song is a big, maudlin affair, led by synthesizers, light guitars and the syrupy, mournful vocals of Giles, all of which are situated over an alternating series of disco-style and thudding tribal drumbeats. “Mutilated World” is sort of catchy, but it doesn’t crunch like metal, emote like singer-songwriter, entrance like dream pop, or swerve like progressive. Rather than defying classification in good way, the song displays an essential lack of coherence that never resolves, making for a slightly uneasy listen.

Songs like “Siphon the Bad Blood” and “I Appear Disappear” also exist in this vaguely anthemic no man’s land, although the latter at least ends with a solo that sounds like late-period Carlos Santana shaking hands with David Gilmour at a Guitar Center demonstration. “M3” and “Wander Drug” shamble along in a state of mostly-static rock blandness, while “We Wander Lonely” and “The Devil Net” do about the same in the electronic vein. “lkcvjvhljbvjΓëÑ╦£Γêå╦Ünnnjmkjijm” is an exception and a bright spot, using beautifully reverbed guitars and plaintive, yet restrained singing to create a wistfully beauteous mood.

But the song that says more than Giles likely intended is “Blueberry Queen.” The song is simply a naked Tom Waits homage, and a laid back one at that. Yet, somehow, it’s one of the most memorable songs on Modern Noise, and it makes one wish that Giles had just gone the full Ween – letting his hair down and having some fun with the genres and influences that BTBAM usually just barrel though. It’s not hard to tell that Giles’ electro-rock lanterns lack an essential fire at their center, and therefore fail to take flight. In the end, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that closer “Modern Noise” should be the album’s introduction and not its conclusion (a “Prequel to the Sequel,” as it were) – because after listening through, one will truly want to declare Modern Noise a mulligan, and give Thomas Giles a chance to start over, and try again from the beginning.