Jake’s Weblog

I’m not normally one to raise a fuss, but I feel it my civic duty to complain about a decline in quality of the rock genre, particularly in the form of Coheed & Cambria.  Yes, fans of Coheed, stone me, because I’m about to tear into Claudio Sanchez (and his hair) with no remorse.

First of all, Claudio is the closest thing to a grown man singing Soprano that I’ve ever heard.  Never mind the fact that he could probably smuggle several illegal immigrants across the border in his hair.  Where I lose all respect for Coheed, though, is their 5-album saga detailing the fictitious Amory Wars, telling the fictitious story of their band.  Basically, they’re trying to rip off The Wall and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars but the difference is that Pink Floyd and David Bowie actually have talent.  If that weren’t enough, there is actually a comic book dedicated to telling the story of Coheed and the Amory Wars.  I think Claudio needs to stop playing D&D and worrying about his hair and focus a little more on making music.  Critics seem to hail these “storytelling albums” as revolutionary and breakthrough, but to be perfectly honest, I thought that even Pink Floyd’s The Wall was mediocre at best. 

Musically speaking, all of Coheed’s songs sound more or less the same, and have much the same feel – they try to sound epic and modern at the same time, but fall horribly flat within seconds.  It’s truly disappointing when I can flip through an album and not find a single song that holds my attention.  Plus their album titles have huge, epic-sounding titles that take a day and a half to read.  At first it wasn’t too bad, their first album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade wasn’t too bad.  No, however, we have Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume I: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness.  What’s next?  I’m thinking something to the tune of: Dear Hippolyta, the Third Phase B-Thrust Inducer is Maintaining the Underlying Principles of the Quiet Planet, Volume XXIVCDE: We’re Stringing As Many Big Words Together As We Can to Sound Big and Important, but This Album is Actually Crap, so Don’t Buy it.  Come on Coheed, you can (probably) do better than this; cut the crap and make some music instead of trying to put your Final Fantasy adventures into song.  I think that if Coheed & Cambria truly is the experimental, progressive band they are hailed as, they should experiment around and find a better sound.