It’s understandable if you weren’t able to fully connect or get into Coheed and Cambria before. Their dense stories about space odysseys and prog-tinged rock may have been a bit intimidating for casual fans to fully immerse themselves in. Luckily for fans who’d be willing to give Coheed another shot, Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind is easily their most accessible set of songs in the past decade, and would be a perfect re-launching point to dive back into the world that this band has created. And for the longtime fans who have been along for the ride since the beginning, there’s so much to enjoy on this new record that should reinvigorate interest in the space rockers for the foreseeable future. The new record was co-produced by guitarist, lead vocalist and band leader Claudio Sanchez, as well as Zakk Cervini (Blink-182, Simple Plan, Bring Me The Horizon) whose contribution helps Coheed and Cambria find the perfect balance between their trademark sound, paired with vibrant pop elements. While making an effort to expand upon the universe created in The Amory Wars story arc, Coheed have simultaneously made their best album in quite some time that demands your immediate attention.

When looking for adjectives to describe Coheed and Cambria and their latest effort, The Unheavenly Creatures, I kept going back to the same word: epic. Coheed have never been strangers to expanding their repertoire of complex space odysseys and intermingled stories of fictional characters, but on this LP they have genuinely created something quite remarkable.

This album grabs your interest directly from the first notes of “Prologue” that sets that stage for all that will come next in this saga. From the shiny and brilliant packaging of the entire album and its artwork, it’s hard not to get directly sucked into the vortex of Coheed’s world on this fantastic record.

Read More “Coheed and Cambria – The Unheavenly Creatures”

Despite how much I listen to music, talk about music, and read about music, every once in I while something happens that makes me realize that I don’t actually know anything. The most recent example of this is Coheed & Cambria’s newest release, Year of the Black Rainbow. The band’s fifth studio album and fourth for Columbia Records is the latest installment of The Amory Wars, a sci-fi storyline penned by lead singer Claudio Sanchez. The story actually begins with Year of the Black Rainbow, so this record serves as a prequel to Coheed & Cambria’s other four albums. I’m certainly no expert on the story of The Amory Wars, and truthfully I’ve only been a casual listener of Coheed & Cambria in the past, not listening to much other than Good Apollo Volume 1. But after spinning Year of the Black Rainbow a few times and immensely enjoying it, I headed over to my most heralded, reliable website for retrieving virtually irretrievable knowledge: Wikipedia. An hour later, I had read numerous articles attempting to describe The Amory Wars, researched releases of multiple comic book series and graphic novels associated with the storyline, and bookmarked links to purchase physical copies of every Coheed & Cambria record I was missing on Amazon. For the past eight years, this profoundly unique group have been telling a story that they created through their music, an absolutely genius and layered story at that, and I had been missing out completely.