Features Blake Richardson Don’t let his calm drumming demeanor with Between the Buried and Me fool you—the ideas flying off his sticks can jolt you like a defibrillator. Long live technical rock ’n’ roll. Story by David Ciauro Photos by Justin Reich Between the Buried and Me’s unique brand of millennial progressive metal is teeming with melodic grandeur, instrumental prowess, and fierce riffs. Woven together into long-form conceptual pieces, the group’s compositions pay tribute to prog forefathers like King Crimson while embracing the trends of contemporary metal. Despite the increasingly crowded nature of the scene, BTBAM remains a bellwether of future heavy rock, and Blake Richardson, who joined the North Carolina–based band in 2005, inspires the kind of rapture that drummers like Periphery’s Matt Halpern and Animals as Leaders’ Matt Garstka have more recently roused in the hearts of modern metal fans. That Richardson’s advanced technique is matched pound for […]

October 2015 Issue