It’s not what you think.
If you’ve seen Buried’s name splashed around nightclub listings and promo posters, you might have thought the band was a little sinister, in that Cannibal Corpse vein. Yes, the band is intense, but you won’t be hearing any death metal at a Buried show.
Buried is a state of mind.
“That’s just the way we felt, you know, trying to live a normal life … and build a professional band after a 10-hour workday,” says lead singer/guitarist Derek McAdow. “It’s just the feeling you get when you open your mailbox, and there are more bills than checks. It’s like most people in life—you feel buried. You just go on. You get an attitude, and you suck it up, and you do what you gotta do.”
The founding members of Buried—McAdow and drummer Scott Nelson—have been doing what they gotta do for nearly seven years now. But though they persevered for five years, recording the CD By Will Alone along the way, they say the band didn’t really come together until two years ago, when they found new bassist Darren Hand.
“When you’re looking for a band mate, you’re looking for more than just somebody to play the bass,” McAdow says. “The camaraderie, the willingness to invest his time equally, and his money. … He came in and matched [our] effort, and it really just changed the band.”
Now, with a new CD scheduled for release in January, the members of Buried say their music is more mature and professional than it’s ever been. What can audience members expect from a Buried show?
“It’s like a muscular performance,” McAdow says. “It’s like a muscle—like a flex, a one-hour flex. It’s pretty powerful.”
But don’t mistake Buried’s intensity for anger, McAdow says, recalling one audience member’s reaction to a recent show:
“At the end of the night, I got off stage, and this girl comes up to me and goes, ‘Man, you’re really hostile.’ And I go, ‘What, you didn’t hear my baby song?’ “ (That’s baby Dylan, McAdow’s 2-week-old son, who interrupted daddy’s interview with a few powerful wails of his own.)
Despite their somewhat despondent name, it’s evident that the members of Buried take adversity in stride. Just ask them what it was like to record their new CD this summer. Hand recorded his bass tracks while suffering from the flu. McAdow played guitar with a 4-inch gash in his arm and laid down the vocal tracks during the Martis Fire, arguably the most lung capacity-challenging event of the year.
“There’s an engineer, two band members and 70 bucks an hour going down the drain for every mistake you make,” McAdow says. “It’s a tense situation.”
But while other bands fall apart in the studio—and that’s without fire and flu and flesh wounds—the members of Buried say that they just emerged stronger for the experience. They plan to take the next couple of weeks off to finish pre-production on the CD, but they’ll be back in full force on New Year’s Eve.
In the meantime, they’re waiting for news of their own Christmas gift: Buried’s music is being test-marketed for a label as they speak, and the word on how they “scored” is due back any day now. But McAdow says even if they don’t score well, they won’t give up until they’re, well, dead and buried.
“Until we’ve been pounded into the ground, literally, and then we’ll probably try one more effort.”