Every End Has a Beginning

Coheed & Cambria's 5th album, the end of 'guilty pleasures,' and the beginning of obsession, fifteen years later.

Note: over on the podcast feed is the “audiobook” version of this essay.

Coheed & Cambria is a nerds’ band. If you only knew their music in the late 2000s from Rock Band, the video game with the plastic instruments that you might have spent a good chunk of your high school graduation money on, you wouldn’t know they are a nerds’ band. You would think, incorrectly and perhaps informed by your own biases which themselves are incorrectly informed by your own insecurities, that Coheed & Cambria are an “emo band,” which I’ll put in scare quotes because:

1. being an “emo band” isn’t in of itself a bad thing

2. no, they aren’t, not the way “emo band” was a pejorative term for a scene more than an actual sonic descriptor of a genre

Had I not been all consumed, the way I suspect most high schoolers are, with the outward presentation of cool instead of being comfortable in my own tastes and free to enjoy them (which, by the way dipshit me of twenty years ago, is cool), I would have clocked the similarities between Coheed & Cambria and another sort of uncool band I mostly enjoyed in secret: Pink Floyd (The Wall remains an undefeated fav-album by non-fav artist since 2004). Both bands write conceptual progressive rock and roll music, both bands know their way around a signature guitar tone, and both bands know how the fuck to use that tone to maximum effect both sonically and narratively. Both bands, sadly, have some tumultuous and tragic former members battling addiction. And both bands have produced all-time classic CD albums that will never not be in my car. Part of the allure to future English majors of Pink Floyd was the mixed media storytelling: it isn’t just that “Comfortably Numb” rocks but that, hey! if you just listen to the lyrics! you’ll note that the song is about the main character, yeah his name is Pink, and he’s suffering! from rock stardom! the whole album is a meditation on the excess and agony of exposure! isn’t that cool, Mom!? Mom? Okay sure I’ll mow the lawn.

Had I known then what I know now I might have let myself enjoy similar concept albums that took the noodely guitar sounds David Gilmour conjured out of the cloudy postwar air in the UK into a heavier realm. Remember: this was my peak White Stripes discovery era. I was “into punk music” (no, I really wasn’t). I would have absolutely loved My Chemical Romance’s The Black Album if I wasn’t preoccupied with being a prick about people who shop at Hot Topic (namely: my best friend Jim’s girlfriend who, how dare he, spent more time with him than I did the year they started dating!). I went through approximately one million heartbreaks between 2002 and 2008, give that kid a copy of Coheed’s Good Apollo Vol. 1 right in the middle of that stretch and there’s no telling how much better adjusted I would have been (probably not, but, guitar solos!).

Instead, I had the Guitar Hero soundtrack, and later, Rock Band. Several years too late the song “Welcome Home” was thrust into my ears by way of my calloused fingertips from shredding the shit out of that sensible plastic Stratocaster.

I don’t want to do revisionist history, I genuinely don’t remember if I liked this song, or not, and if I didn’t, if it was because of the dogshit cover (the band would later go back and license the actual song once Rock Band proved to be a massive success) or because I was still “too cool” or if it was because I sucked at the song. My guess: a little of all the above.

What does this have to do with Coheed & Cambria’s fifth album, Year of the Black Rainbow, out now for fifteen full years as of this April?

There’s a reason Coheed & Cambria are a nerds’ band, why they are so similar to Pink Floyd (particularly The Wall, The Division Bell, and Dark Side of the Moon but only if you are having the full mixed media pothead experience with The Wizard of Oz) because Coheed & Cambria don’t just have one or two concept records. They are a concept band (leader singer Claudio Sanchez’s deeply autobiographical love letter to new fatherhood in the form of 2015’s The Color Before the Sun notwithstanding). They are producing a decades-long science fiction epic that stretches over multiple volumes of comic books, one novel, three novellas (most recently in the Vaxis pentalogy of albums we may have just learned the connection to the broader narrative in The Father of Make Believe that was released last month) and the immensely cool concept sketchbook that came bundled with 2012’s double-album The Afterman featuring artwork and lore.

You could say their album-tours, entitled “Neverender” after one of the best songs on their debut album, are themselves narrative lore vessels with character artwork on tee shirts and hoodies, visuals behind the band on stage, and the recontextualization of other songs in The Concept during encores or pre-show VIP acoustic performances.

If that seems like too much of a data dump, I’m sorry. Let me simplify. The Coheed & Cambria albums occur in two (but probably just one) mythos: The Amory Wars and Vaxis. Vaxis takes place maybe before, or maybe after, or maybe during The Amory Wars.

The Amory Wars starts in chronological-release order of the bands’ albums. Second Stage Turbine Blade is about the disaster that warps IRO-bots Coheed and Cambria (the early protagonists, not the band) into a world-shattering path of destruction, In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: III centers Claudio (a main character, not the guy with the awesome hair in the band) - take a deep breath here folks - Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness introduces a wrinkle in The Concept where “the fiction meets the real” and we meet Ryder, who is the fictional guy writing The Amory Wars and really going through some shit and long story short a demon in the form of a bicycle tells him to start killing people because he is the god of his story and also god in real life and it gets messy and The Willing Well, the iconic guillotine from the album art and some of Coheed’s sickest tee shirts my mom would have hated me wearing in 2005, transports Ryder into his own fictional world where he meets Claudio and Supreme Tri-Mage Wilhelm Ryan who is the architect of Claudio and Coheed and Cambria and the whole Kilganon family’s misfortune and …

Deep breath. Did I say a demonic bicycle?

I did say “demonic bicycle.” Listen to “Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood & Burial)”

The original Amory Wars quadrilogy (is that a word? that’s a word) ends with, another deep breath, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World For Tomorrow and the comics from that album are just now wrapping up not quite twenty years after the album’s release so I won’t speak on lore I won’t read until the hardback omnibus comes out but, let’s just say some shit goes down between good and evil and who knows what happens.

Contemporarily, No World for Tomorrow is released in October 2007. I am a senior in high school, In Rainbows was just given to me personally by Radiohead for free so I am not inclined to listen to Coheed’s love letter to 80s rock and roll music. I probably do not even know Coheed & Cambria exist. Josh Eppard, their original drummer, has left the band. That’s an important detail for later. For the moment, though, with Eppard out, and a suite of songs all called “The End Complete,” it is looking like this party is over before I’ve even showed up for it.

World of (Time)lines

You know I am a Star Wars fan, another fiction with a rabid fanbase and occasionally confusing timeline. The Amory Wars is similar; yet another reason I should have been in Camp Coheed earlier. Here is the release order for all The Fiction:

1. Second Stage Turbine Blade (2002, album)

2. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 (2003, album)

3. The Bag.On.Line Adventures of Coheed & Cambria (2004, comic, discontinued after two issues)

4. Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness (2005, album)

5. Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness (2005, standalone graphic novel)

6. The Amory Wars: Second Stage Turbine Blade (2007, comics, continuing series)

7. Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. II: No World for Tomorrow (2007, album)

Up to this point, with the exception of the discontinued Bag.On.Line Adventures issues and the now non-canon Good Apollo V.1 graphic novel, release order and story order coincide. Suck that, George Lucas. But don’t worry, as I enter the picture as a fan, the timelines get a little freaky.

8. Year of the Black Rainbow (2010, prequel album and novelization, story of Coheed and Cambria’s creator and the origins of Supreme Tri-Mage Ryan and his rise to power)

9. The Amory Wars: In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 (2010, comics, continuing series)

10. The Afterman: Ascension (2012) and Descension (2013, double album, prequel to YOTBR)

11. The Afterman (2012, story and concept art sketch book)

12. The Amory Wars: Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness (2017, comics, ongoing series)

13. Vaxis - Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures (2018, album and novella of the Vaxis Fiction, connected, somehow, to The Amory Wars)

14. Vaxis - Act II: A Window of the Waking Mind (2022, album and novella)

15. The Amory Wars: Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. II: No World for Tomorrow (2024, comics, continuing series)

16. Vaxis - Act III: The Father of Make Believe (2025, album and novella - sort of, copies are still shipping and, as of this writing, not out in the wild yet)

That’s release order, with respect of 2015’s The Color Before the Sun, which while not a canon entry in The Amory Wars, includes many of the themes - love, sacrifice, parenthood - is a directly autobiographical album about Claudio Sanchez’s life. To recap, though, story order is not quite the same. Let’s leave Vaxis off in the miasma of The Great Crash (cannot wait to read about that little piece of lore…) and just look at The Amory Wars, the story being told in across the albums and ongoing comics:

1. Afterman - about the guy who discovers the Keywork (if you’ve seen a Coheed fan, look at their arm, leg, neck, or body - with permission! - and you’ll see the Keywork, its a triangle with circles) which is the network of energy uniting all the planets in Heaven’s Fence, which is their world’s Milky Way

2. Year of the Black Rainbow - about the guy who invents IRO-bots including the titular characters Cambria, her boo Coheed, and his brother, Jesse. Together they fight against the rising fascist Wilhelm Ryan, who is in political and actual combat to seize power and crown himself a god figure over Heaven’s Fence. The Mage Wars kick off and Hohenberger, basically Coheed and Cambria’s dad, accidentally invents the bioweapons that become core Coheed iconography: the dragonfly syringes. At the end of the novel, Ryan tragically victorious, Jesse wipes Coheed & Cambria’s memories, and sends them to live peacefully where they raise a family.

3. Second Stage Turbine Blade - 20 years later

4. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: III - 10 years after

5. Good Apollos Vol. 1 & 2 - pretty much direct sequels

Why, though, dear reader, do I illustrate to you the multimedia spectacle, the head-scratching alternate reading order, the confounding non-release story order, the novels, the scrapbooks, the comic books, the gosh darn albums themselves? The answer is not to overwhelm, but rather, to situate, or even more accurately, to demonstrate the rich, rich, textual history this band and their narrative has.

It was this rich tapestry of interconnected storytelling across multiple media formats that got me into the band in the first place. That, and some hand-claps and ‘woah-ohs.’

Important break to be really real: none of this shit matters. You do not need to read the comics, you do not need to flip through tabs on Coheed’s own “Ghansgraad” Wiki (Ghansgraad is the universe’s holy text, like a bible, but space!). All you need to understand Coheed & Cambria is this song, and at least three other people packed into a car, singing and clapping along:

Let’s just say you are a freshman in college, you have the sense that being ‘too cool’ for shit is no longer a viable way to enjoy life, especially now that all this new life has opened up to you. You are no longer in high school, you are no longer in your small town, you are still beholden to other people and their cars to go places, but those other people are not your parents.

Okay, let’s drop the pretense, we’re talking about me. I was all of those things in 2008 and 2009, while Coheed was wrapping up a tour, working with a slightly new lineup, and beginning to write and record Year of the Black Rainbow I was fully immersing myself in Otterbein’s college radio station: WOBN.

I don’t want to say radio was just a hobby, though as an English major, Communication, Broadcasting, and production classes were not exactly necessary, but I was already deeply in love with music. Doing radio was more of a personality, a way to embody my appendix of musical taste: The White Stripes? Hell yeah. Radiohead? Hell yeah. The Gaslight Anthem, hot off the heels of all time great The ‘59 Sound, hell yeah. Those whacky dudes in Animal Collective, sort of, but hell yeah once “My Girls” dropped early in Winter semester 2009. What I wanted to do in my free time was play songs I liked on the radio, and ideally, be congratulated for how good those songs I liked were. It was easy to make friends down in the Comm building, and one of the friends I made at orientation earlier in the summer, Brent, was a broadcasting major so it was nice to have a buddy who could show me around his dojo, so to speak.

Enter Bryan. Let’s call him a guru. Let’s call 33 W. Collegeview his dojo. Bryan was a Cool Older Guy Upper Classman. He put us on to the cheap Chinese place in Westerville, he was quick to help, or hang out, offer to drive somewhere (often: Taco Bell), and he always took what you had to say seriously. We talked a lot about music, he was a big fan of Rush (“Tom Swayer,” also in Rock Band, big fan), he was also from Northeastern Ohio, he was and still is one of the most goddamn interesting dudes I’ve ever met.

I could write a dissertation on how cool Bryan is, and how cool Bryan seemed to me in 2008 when I was desperately trying to shed the self-sabotaging tendency of Trying to Be Cool and simply Be Cool. Bryan oozed Be-ing. Teach me, sensei. “Sure,” Bryan said, probably wearing some outrageous multicolored spandex outfit while driving to a neat hookah bar with delicious hummus, or whatever.

In my mind, I had known Bryan for a while before Coheed came up, which either makes the most sense, or no sense at all, because Bryan loves Coheed & Cambria more than I love anything that isn’t Ben, Rachel, or the dogs. He was wise to slow play it, maybe, wait until I had fully shed the cocoon of that lingering high schooler’s resentment I’d had for so many things I enjoy now. Maybe we were in the studio filling time with music and chatter. Maybe the conversation went something like this:

Me: hey, let’s play this really arduous Radiohead song.

Bryan: I don’t think senior citizens in Westerville want to hear “Paranoid Android” again, you just played it two songs ago.

Me: yeah man, but it wails.

Bryan: you know what else wails? Coheed & Cambria, this band that I like so much I have their logo tattooed on my shoulders.

Me: oh, ugh, that emo band with the guy with the voice? I never listened to them. They probably suck. Emo bands suck. Suck suck suck suck. (note: nice job, dipshit, “the guy with the voice”? yeah say that to a super fan, real polite, me).

Bryan: you like that Rock Band song, “Welcome Home,” surely you’ve played that one?

Me: no, that song sucks. Sucks sucks sucks.

Bryan, unplugging the aux to spare listeners my redline eq’d songs off of my iPod classic and putting “Welcome Home” on: come on, this song rules.

Me: well, if I’m being honest, I do like this song, I even have it on my iPod: look.

At this point, I am no longer taking creative liberties with this story. I did have “Welcome Home” on my iPod, and I did have what to me felt like a secret and perverse enjoyment of it. I went as far as to name the band and album “Rock Band,” a fact I boasted to Bryan as if I were some kind of sleeper agent protecting state secrets.

I guess you could say this is my guilty pleasure song.

History is recorded as teetering over a critical moment: the birth of Jesus Christ. B.C.: there were beasts, and man, fire, and wheel. Then A.D., Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord,” the life, death, and resurrection. Not bad for a newsletter about a progressive rock and roll band’s prequel concept album coming out on Easter, right?

My own personal demarcation for B.C. / A.D. (not AC/DC, that’s another newsletter altogether), the new epoch in the long life of a lover of music is about to happen in Otterbein College’s student-led radio station, The Wildcard. Out of reverence for the event, I won’t try to recreate dialogue. I hope I’ve recreated Bryan well enough with what time I’ve had that you’ll believe me when I say that he, while empathetically to my own foolhardy immaturity, was horrified at the idea of having a guilty pleasure.

He may have given some version of the speech I give when I’m sensing students in my classes are feeling foolish instead of leaning into the things they love where I point out how difficult this world, life, can be, and that when you find something precious, no matter how vapid, or silly, or how highly sung the notes are by the guy with the amazing hair, that you should cling on to it. Pleasure, not time, not money is our most precious resource. Boom.

It would take years to fully settle into this new way of thinking - no more guilty pleasures - but before the guitar solo in “Welcome Home” even hit I was hearing things differently.

Why have you posted this blurry photograph of a Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game, Tony? Great question! It should come to you as no surprise I also was “too cool” for sports. Comes with the territory if you are coming up as a pompous future poet on your way to a tiny liberal arts college to study literature creative writing. Sometimes you have to play the part, and the part I played very, very well, was thinking sports were a dumb activity for dumb people. This is, maybe, one of my All Time Worst Takes (and I genuinely love Nickelback’s Silver Side Up and think its a no-skips hard rock album take that hipsters!).

Back in the late 00s, I think, the Blue Jackets were very bad. Or they weren’t, but they were very good at marketing. Either way, Otterbein studnets could get extremely cheap tickets that came with goodish seats and included a meal voucher for an actually good buffet. We went to several games during Winter 2009. Remember earlier when I mentioned that all you needed to enjoy Coheed & Cambria was three other people in a car singing along to “Blood Red Summer”? Sure you do!

The three other people were Brent, his buddy Curt, Bryan, and Bryan’s girlfriend Brittany. I guess that’s four other people. Three in the backseat. I’m not a math guy. Anyway, it was Bryan’s car and he had cajoled me into tagging along for the hockey game with the crew: Brent and Curt, both broadcasting guys also knew Bryan from the radio and are sports guys, Bryan and Brittany, not assholes, also sports guys. Me: asshole. Needs bullied into going to have fun for next-to-free.

I can tell you exactly what spot on 270 South we are when DJ B cues up “Blood Red Summer,” which is not “Welcome Home,” you’ll listen to it so I don’t have to describe too much but I’m told its more poppy, more fun to sing along to, less “scary” or “heavy” than “Welcome Home” and thus less scary or heavy than what I have decided Coheed & Cambria’s music all must sound like. I’m told this song is deeply meaningful to Bryan, that “come what may” is a top candidate for lyrics he would get tattooed on his body. I don’t blame him now, though, then, I wasn’t that cognizant of the lyrics. The music, though. Man. Listen to the song, then check back in.

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Isn’t that fun? Maybe its trite to call a song with “summer” in the title breezy, but damn it, “Blood Red Summer” is breezy. This is the car ride where Bryan tells me the best Coheed songs, in fact, the best kind of any songs, has either hand claps in it, or ‘woah-ohs.’ Either way: the audience is involved in the making of the music, the joy being made, but also shared, by the band playing. “Blood Red” has both. And as we pass the Morse Rd. exit, an exit I pass three times a week on my way to work some 16 years later, I still remember stiffly sitting between Curt and Brent feeling my guard, in real time, going down. “So destined I am to walk among the dark,” Claudio sings as if he is talking to me about the walls I have built around myself. I am Pink (not the color, the main character in Pink Floyd’s The Wall). I am hidden away in the darkness of my own pretense. “A child in keeping secrets from …” Yes, truly, a child, a doofus, a fuddy duddy. Guilty pleasures? Fuck that. My new friends and I are having this moment (while passing the Easton Town Center) and it is real and it feels real and it is real good. I don’t remember the hockey game. I don’t remember exactly what we ate beforehand, though I do remember getting an extra chocolate mudslide desert, I couldn’t tell you the score of the Blue Jackets game that evening, but I can tell you this: that child woke up and stopped keeping secrets from himself. I tore down the walls.

As “Blood Red Summer” ends, Claudio repeats the phrase: “what did I do to deserve?” and it is easy to think that’s negative. Maybe it is, I haven’t read that comic book in awhile, I don’t remember, but in that moment of elation - 80s style glam metal guitar noodling, Bryan, Brittany, Brent, Curt, me - all clapping along, all screaming ‘woah-ohs’ at each other: man, that’s a treat. I did deserve that. All it took was accepting joy.

“Every end has a beginning”

Year of the Black Rainbow is a prequel to the original four Amory Wars albums. It is the origin story of the titular characters, and the backstory for how the villain of the concept came to power. There’s a bleakness to the narrative, there’s a bleakness to the sonics of the album itself. There’s some bleak tabloid drama within the band itself: this is the only studio appearance of replacement drummer Chris Pennie. During the tour, Mic Todd, will fall deep enough into addiction that he can no longer play bass in the band. Between the finality of No World for Tomorrow in 2007, the unspoken closure of the Neverender shows in 2008, Coheed’s future was uncertain.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this. What I knew was, in 2010, a brand new album by a brand new favorite band was coming out. No more deep back catalogue to plunder, no more burned Coheed mix CDs from Bryan. I would be a part of this. Like the characters in the fiction, Year of the Black Rainbow was also an origin story for me, and my own experiences in the Coheed fandom. If The Amory Wars were ending, this was the beginning of it all. For me, this dull sense of ‘too-coolness’ was ending. I was beginning to enjoy music in a new way, an earnest way, guilty just pleasure. That’s not a lesson we learn in the text of Year of the Black Rainbow, but it is a lesson the album constantly reminds me of.

Technically, I have been a fan of this band for sixteen years, but it really started the day Year of the Black Rainbow came out, the day I got to open my first deluxe preorder box set, analyze the lyrics book, watch the making of documentary, turn the novel over and back in my hands and study clues on the dust jacket, and of course, endlessly listen to the songs.

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Here’s a funny little detail: Year of the Black Rainbow is exactly fifteen songs long, if you are counting the deluxe edition bonus demo tracks and the iTunes edition bonus track as well, and I do. Let’s talk about these songs:

1. “One” interpolates the consistent theme, which I have seen sometimes referred to as The Amory Wars theme; its the instrumentals you hear at the beginning of every Coheed & Cambria album, but, because this 5th album is actually the prequel story, it is the most simple iteration of the tune. Haunting. Suggestive of the fact that Atticus Ross, frequent Nine Inch Nails collaborator, is producing this record.

2. “The Broken” announces Atticus Ross’s production like a fist swinging into your jaw. This song rocks. The lead single. Impossible to remember what my knee jerk reaction was to this song, but I can tell you these fifteen years later, only “The Dark Sentencer” is a better side one track one in the Coheed catalogue.

3. “Guns of Summer” is a weird little song, clearly a Chris Pennie showcase, the drumming gets way, way more technical (can drumming be mathy or is that just a guitar thing? let’s call it math drummy for fun). This is not a value judgement on Josh, but Chris was doing some different shit and it rips. This is their 86th most played song but not their least-played YOTBR song. Go figure, they haven’t played it since Pennie left the band. I think Josh could do it.

4. “Here We Are Juggernaut” is in the top three ‘Coheed Songs I Wish Rachel Liked So I Could Play Them as a Big Romantic Gesture.”

   There is so much joy in this song, it is what a first kiss sounds like. Wait? Is this a love song? This has been a top three favorite Coheed song for fifteen years and I’m reading these lyrics and maybe Rachel is right about this one. Song still rules.

5. “Far” is, to my ear, the most Atticus Rossy on the record. YOTBR’s many haters will try to convince you “the production is muddied” or “it all sounds like one big wall of sound” or “there are no dynamics.” Run “Far” back, nerds, and tell me the soundscapes aren’t part of the narrative (also: dynamics? OK audiophile!). Look no further than the slick little guitar slide between the final verse’s “no matter the distance / no matter how far” lines. For those keeping score, “Far” is the Coheed song that has made me cry the second-most times out of any other. #1? The answer will surprise you¹

6. “This Shattered Symphony” was Bryan’s favorite song on the album. I pride myself in remembering that. Bryan: if you read this and I am wrong do not correct me.

7. “World of Lines” this is the hidden truth, the world between the lines, there is no understanding uuUUUUUUSSSSSSSS. Man, I love how Claudio sings that opening line. Never not stuck in my head, especially the affectation he puts on “us.” Hey, this is a punk song, The Ramones could have written “World of Lines.” Why this isn’t a setlist mainstay is beyond me, man.

8. “Made Out of Nothing (All That I Am)” is a big theatrical track. Its the most Good Apollo sounding joint. This song is enjoying a bit of a renaissance recently. Coheed pulled it out during the 2023 music festival cruise aboard the S.S. Neverender and the response was overwhelmingly positive, as if, actually, this album and its songs all kick ass live.

   You can’t tell from this video, but I’m sure the crowd went apeshit when this song started. Let’s assume they did.

9. “Pearl of the Stars” is the “Wake Up” of Black Rainbow, except, somehow, way more sad. I remember the moment in the book when the Pearl character meets her fate and the lyrics and dialogue are perfectly aligned and no I’m not crying in the dorm room bathroom while reading a hardback book that came bundled with a prog rock CD why who’s asking?

10. “In the Flame of Error” good song. Very theatrical. Sounds like an In Keeping Secrets b-side, or an Unheavenly Creatures a-side. I can remember singing this one really hard while riding my bike around campus, which is not the vibe of the song at all.

11. “When Skeletons Live” is the least-played song from the album, with a dismal 17 performances. It is tied with “Deranged,” the freakin’ Batman video game soundtrack song, and got one more time than their cover of Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” Am I bitter they busted this out after the Royal Oak stop on the tour, and thus, have never seen it played? Yes.

12. “The Black Rainbow” brings the album home with messy and chaotic soundscapes and lyrical closure for the tragic ending of the album. I’ll say it: this is their most conceptual album. The Fiction and the songs are really, really nicely aligned and, again, that’s just as much the production choices as it is Claudio’s writing. “Now I’ll never let this go, I sang.” No shit Coheed, me neither. At the end of “The Black Rainbow” Wilhelm Ryan laughs evilly and it is so alarming and so cool.

13. “Chamberlain” (demo) another pretty mathy song I have to guess Chris Pennie had a heavy hand in writing. Its fun. Good cardio music, I should add it to my running playlist. Nasty little key change.

14. “The Lost Shepherd” (demo) this song could have easily been on either of The Afterman records, but instead, is stuck to a life of obscurity. I’m confident a full fledged studio recording would make “The Lost Shepherd” an all-timer Coheed track. Even as an unfinished demo you can hear how sick this song is. Some of Travis Stever’s best guitar work here. This song rocks.

15. “Hush” is my number one favorite Coheed & Cambria song and the day they play it is the day I’ll stop going to see Coheed because no moment, future or past, will top the moment I get to hear freakin’ “Hush” live. I’m not making the “Juggernaut” mistake again: I know for sure these are some romantic god I wish Rachel dug Coheed so I could impress her by putting this song on a playlist ass lyrics.

    Nothing beats it, and since we’re on the subject, here are my top three Coheed songs, in order:

    1. “Hush”

    2. “The Crowing”

    3. “The Hard Sell”

    This song rules, I remember going to Washington D.C. for a class trip which I used as a chance to see my brother at Georgetown and listened to, almost exclusively, “Hush” while riding the Metro and commuting around the District. I was also deep into Fallout 3 that semester, so the D.C. of it all with this song is as strong as it is strange.

    I’m just saying, Rachel, “there’s just no one in this world like you my darling dear. Can I go living on this life without you?” No. And I don’t want to think about it, so I won’t.

So, now what? There are more albums after of Year of the Black Rainbow than there are before it, so all that “ending” stuff didn’t pan out. Josh came back to drum once again in his band. People in the know seem to believe Mic Todd is doing well, Zach Cooper, his replacement, has found more than a warm home in the group. Their new albums are just as good, if not a little different, than their old albums, and, ever since their divisive fifth, the first narrative and sonic experiment Coheed & Cambria did, I’ve been there, every step of the way. What a treat to love something that brings you joy fully. How odd that it is this nerdy ass progressive rock and roll band?

Maybe not that odd at all. Maybe you’ll find something, or someone, or some combination of persons, places, and things, that makes you a better person, a less cynical person, a person more comfortable liking what they like and being who they are.

I hope you find that something, somewhere, under the rainbow.

1. “Rise, Naianasha (Cut the Cord)” from Vaxis Act II came out the week we brought Ben home from the hospital and is, literally, textually, about new parents scared shitless but promising to protect their kiddo no matter what. Choice lyric: “Oh, my baby boy, don’t you cry / it’s you and I in a do or die.” Cue the waterworks, baby.