You Can Be My Wave

Berried Alive is the musical duo of Charles and Kaylie Caswell, two incredibly talented musicians. Their guitar/bass playing is innovative, technical, and oftentimes leaves me speechless. The band's personality is also quite tongue-in-cheek as their album and song titles often contain silly fruit puns. They don't seem to take themselves too seriously which I think is pretty admirable. As far as their sound, Berried Alive bridges different subgenres of metal with trap influenced hip-hop and elements of EDM.

On their fifth record, The Mixgrape, I found quite a few interesting instrumentals. The opening song Bombegranate has a djent styled riff that has gone acoustic, and it's pretty catchy. The guitar tone on Post Office sounds more like a synth that would be used on a video game soundtrack or an extravagant J-Pop tune. The speedy finger tapping is not only very flashy, but also tasteful and melodic as well which are qualities most virtuoso guitar shredders lack in my opinion. The last one I'll point out is Blood Orange which is a total guitar freakout. Demonic harmonizing, insane shredding and tapping, and a crazy riff involving heavy use of pick scraping that frankly blows my mind.

Unfortunately, the vocals and lyrics here were not really for me on nearly every track. Tracks like Strawberry Serenity and Lemon Drop contain some pretty personal lyrics concerning depression and anxiety, but I found the vocal performances to be rather uninspired. There's a lack of personality and tonal shift which drags down the rest of the song. There are a few occasions where the vocals and lyrics work in tandem to really bring down a track. One example is Starfishman which features fairly amateur rap verses about their mic skills and flexing on the haters. It is beyond corny (perhaps intentionally) because the skills aren't really there to back up even the weakest of disses. I get similar feelings on the aforementioned Blood Orange which makes me terribly sad considering how amazing the instrumental is. The lyrics on this track speak on the various comments Charles Caswell has gotten on the validity, and I guess, authenticity of his guitar playing. Again, the lyrics come off kinda petty and immature.

I didn't quite enjoy this one all that much because I felt the vocals detracted so much from the great musicianship on all these songs. Luckily for me, however, the duo have graciously released an instrumental version which I will be jamming to from here on out. If you want to stay on top of new things going on in the world of guitar, then I implore you to check out these virtuosos.