Coheed And Cambria
No World For Tomorrow
Columbia Records
By Jose Fritz
Oh that was high drama in the spring wasn’t it? Pennie left Dillinger Escape Plan, Gil Sharone of Stolen Babies took over drumming duties for him, leaving former Coheed drummers Josh Eppard and Nate Kelley scrounging for subway tokens in South Boston. Pennie was spectacular in Dillinger Escape Plan and was no slacker in his prior bands Idiot Pilot, Point 5, All Else Failed, and Boxer. As good as this album is, the mystery remains: what if the lawyers could have been denuded and Pennie actually laid down those tracks? It’s a good record but more melodrama led up to the release than an episode of the Real World.
The best thing about the prog-rock label is that it’s embedded with heterogeneous expectation. Bands sound dissimilar from each other, and across their own catalogs. Not only is the variety tolerated, the divergences are expected. If you go back and revisit Shabutie, you can hear both the prototypical material for our contemporary Coheed material but also a band that definitely has been well marinated in Yes and The Nice. Coheed’s specialty for 12 years has been writing pretty songs, beautiful songs smooth to the touch, coated in two layers of polyurethane and polished to a fine sheen with 600 grit sandpaper.
Is there a more proggy band alive today in America? I think not. Coheed and Cambria has always lived up to that reputation. I first saw them at MacRock; I think it was 1999. They were crammed into a small stage at the end of a bar that was even more crammed with adoring twenty-somethings all wasted at 2:00 in the afternoon. It was a crowing achievement for the city of Blacksburg, Virginia.
Forget for a moment the concept behind their last 5 records was a messianic “armory war” comic book; forget the whole uber-nerd, sci-fi parallel universe story line thing and just listen to the music. Coheed is in the middle of a decade’s long transformation to a genuine 1970s prog-rock band. Their earlier albums still had ties to the emo and screamo movements. But after Good Apollo, they’d passed even Soft Machine on the AmIProgOrNot.com website. Currently their score hovers between Rush and King Crimson. The string sections, the soaring guitar solos, and the use of leitmotif… it’s become undeniable. They’ve traveled back in time with each record. They’d be there now if Claudio, would cut his damn hair.
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