Review Summary: So it goes.
For anyone who may have checked out after the concept “ended” nearly twenty years ago, Coheed and Cambria have survived a few rounds of lineup changes, prequels, sequels, and side-quels to its concept with (extremely) varying degrees of success. The band has shown time and time again that they are still capable of having a pulse with healthy mix of fist-pumping amalgamations of “Welcome Home” that kept the pace (“Key Entity Extraction I: Domino the Destitute”, “The Dark Sentencer”) and attempts to broaden what a Coheed song could be (aping The Police on “Number City” or whatever “Peace to the Mountain” is), but even as a card-carrying Child of the Fence*, it’s been hard to deny that some of the fire hasn’t dimmed over the years. It’s certainly not for lack of trying. The aforementioned “concept” that has been the band’s calling card since inception has only ballooned in concept since their heyday, and there are simply too many ideas being thrown around for anyone to accuse them of resting on their laurels.
*
Okay, fine, I have never actually had one of their special membership cards.
The band’s last effort,
Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind, was …polarizing, to say the least. Guitarist Travis Stever had never had less to do. Whether that was a result of a puzzling mix or the songs themselves being stripped down to be fairly boilerplate power chords that largely followed along with predictable vocal passages from Claudio Sanchez wasn’t always an easy distinction to make, and some of the ideas, like the full-on electro-pop “A Disappearing Act,” were maybe a step too far from the band’s purview. Still, I (mostly) loved it as an unapologetic superfan and its lengthy, theatrical title track stood as a career-highlight, but I don’t blame others for deciding they wanted off the ride or having questions.
After all, the band’s latest has me asking one: Where has
this Coheed been?
Keep the qualifiers to yourself,
Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe is among the band’s best, taking all the lessons learned over three decades as a band and delivering some of the most moving, urgent, and epic songs in their entire catalog. Everything that initially made the band so endearing and special in the first place is on full display here. The guitars are back in a big way, freed from the shackles of chasing Claudio’s vocal passages in order to dance and twirl with the wide-eyed ambition of yesteryear - just listen to how even a poppier like “One Last Miracle” is allowed to soar! On “Play the Poet,” the band remember how sharp their teeth are with one of their most aggressive songs ever that includes a genuine breakdown, and a palpable sense of giddiness for how high they are flying their freak flag thanks to some vintage vocal grit not seen since the likes of
In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3.
That giddiness is a bonafide contagion, infecting every inch of this thing. “Goodbye, Sunshine” is one of the more boilerplate modern ‘Heed songs on offer and it’s just so much more fun and alive than so much of what has been served in the previous decade and a half. Claudio pulls off the theatrics with aplomb, winking at the camera as he sings “old habits die hard” in the chorus of a song that naturally calls back to “Blood Red Summer” in its verses* for the millionth time. You get the sense that he knows you know, so when he says “I don’t wanna do that grind every damn night” and “some things are better off dead” I believe him!
*
I swear the pre-chorus is an ode to Cheap Trick’s “Dream Police”
Much of the album is about the relationship to the past and how it shapes the present. Within the text, the interdimensional(?), time-traveling(?) characters are certainly dealing with a lot, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t care. Well, mostly. The actual plot and particulars have never really mattered to me outside of the musical motifs scattered throughout Coheed’s catalog that hit with the tact of a sledgehammer. Thankfully, those absolutely hit here. So while I couldn’t tell you what exactly is going on, I can tell you that I did a backflip at the musical reveal at the beginning of “The Continuum I: Welcome to Forever, Mr. Nobody” and again in the closing moments of the album’s final song, “The Continuum IV: So It Goes.”* But while I can’t tell you about Vaxis the character or theorize who the hell Blindside Sonny is (other than hopefully having nothing to do with Sandra Bullock), I can tell you that Claudio loves his son to death and, like the rest of us, wonders what the hell he can do to fight the not-so-creeping rise of fascism the western world is experiencing.
*
It is simply a crime to not take every opportunity you can to type out these absurd song titles in full.
If that sounds heavy, it’s because it is. Coheed have always been a deeply silly and fun band, but the band at its best has always had a beating heart that could still move you to tears through all the melodrama." Claudio sings "where have all of the angels gone to burn their wings" on the title track and, well, where did
that come from? The aforementioned “The Continuum I: Welcome to Forever, Mr. Nobody” finds the real, actual Claudio feeling sorry for himself in the state of the world while singing “a bit part actor playing the world’s smallest violin” -while an
actual violin faintly plays over just this line -it rules! “The Continuum II: The Flood” has him singing “sharing secrets through a force-fed lyric/I can’t seem to dream anymore/I don’t even dream anymore” -it rules! “The Continuum III: Tethered Together” is literally just about tethering himself to the audience when he sings “our voices will unify in harmony/sing together/tethered forever” -it rules! And, to put a bow on The Continuum suite, “The Continuum IV: So It Goes” is just the hoedown from “Window of the Waking Mind” extrapolated to full-length with a healthy mix of ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky”...it also rules! Not since the band’s earliest days have I felt at such a loss as to where to start listing off the seemingly endless instances of “it rules,” but hopefully the point has gotten across.
Vaxis III: Father of Make Believe is the best Coheed and Cambria album not in one decade, but two. The band sound so invigorated and revitalized by their creative possibilities that they not only remind you of why they were such a feverish draw in the first place, but confidently add on to the long list of reasons that were there. If reading all this makes your head spin from the sheer amount of inscrutable name drops and references or the idea of another Coheed album is too exhausting, I get it. But for anyone who still holds even a passing interest in the band after all these years, “don’t close the coffin yet.”
