Revisiting The Color Before the Sun by Coheed and Cambria

Hello, welcome to AsterTracks! In case you were unaware we are doing a mini series diving into some of the more lesser appreciated Coheed and Cambria records throughout the month of April. If you wish to read the piece on Year of the Black Rainbow or The Afterman you can find them by clicking the respective title.

So we arrive at the end, The Color Before the Sun, Coheed’s eighth record released in 2015. I have a complicated relationship with this one, this being the first time I invested into the boxset on a Coheed and Cambria record, I even got extravagant and had my name put in the credits. It was the first time in my life I was really making enough money to justify a big purchase like this and I was really anticipating the release of the record. When the acoustic demo for “Atlas” leaked I was totally in love and when the first official single “You Got Spirit, Kid” dropped I was just sort of warm on it. I ultimately didn’t love the record and for a long time considered it my least favorite in the discography. On the band’s side it was a different process for Claudio Sanchez as he lived in an apartment complex that he didn’t feel at home in and couldn’t really write effective demos, which led to a much more toned down album. He was also totally out of concept to write about and it was overall just a big change up period for the band.

The album starts out unlike any other in the band’s catalog with “Island.” It opens with these far off tenor vocals and is overall the poppiest this band has ever been. There is a catchy hook as well as a song structure that while easy to follow along with does have its moments of spice. In the early parts of the song there is a loud snare, the bassline gets heavier in verse two, even when they’re writing pop rock Coheed is still Coheed. A lot of the concepts Sanchez is singing about here, while very easy to relate to, seem to be a window into his world during the making of the record. He’s living in a place he doesn’t even like where the rent is too high and is desperate for a way out, something that basically anyone can latch onto.

We go a little more traditional on “Eraser.” On this one I started to realize this record seems to be the band trying to get back into gear so to speak. Not only are we doing some very classic Coheed things like a forced laugh before a guitar solo, we’re also singing to the musicians around us. The line;

“Oh I’m not mad, lean on me man.”

To me, now anyway, feels like him talking to his band mates and maybe getting some aggression out within the family, so to speak. There’s definite themes of wanting to go back to what the band was before it was this titan of success and expectation in that chorus. That being said I don’t love a lot of the word play, for example saying you’re “not the right plastic” feels like sort of a forced metaphor.

“Colors” is similar in concept to “Pearl of the Stars” both in structure and what’s being said. The key lines in each song;

“When you go I will know, follow you to the stars and when the world falls apart there’ll be a place for your car.”

-Pearl of the Stars

“And when the world comes crashing down don’t make a move don’t make a sound. Just watch it fall, watch it come down and feel it as it goes. Does it feel good to let go?”

-Colors

To me each implies the same thing but one comes off much stronger. The emotion behind; “things are bad but you have me to get through them with” is much stronger than “there will be a place for you at the end of the world.” None of this to say the track is perfect, in fact I think it’s a major product of its environment. To me as much as I love a slow song or two to break up a record this feels like the exact thing driving Claudio Sanchez to make this album; a light rock, hush tone song we can listen to without the neighbors complaining. We also get some revamped vocal stylings on “Ghost” later, which is similar to “Far” from the same record as “Pearl.”

You don’t get a lot of strict love songs out of Coheed but “Here to Mars” is certainly one of them. Here, Sanchez uses the space themes he’s used to using to convey his emotions in a setting he’s comfortable in and despite the fact that it isn’t his strongest showing, I still appreciate him shooting for what he did. The song itself, on the other hand, is exceptionally strong. The bassline is crazy and loud in fact everything is huge and uses arena rock elements like synths and gang vocals to make it really stand out. We’re even doing some classic Coheed with things like inserting a buried out spoken word bit that almost feels like a dialogue from one of their concept records.

The track Atlas, which was written for Sanchez’s son, is cut from the same cloth as “Island” and “Eraser.” It’s all built upon one riff and melody and while there are a lot of choruses and the song has a rather long six minute run-time, it never feels all that tiring. Lyrically Sanchez is tuning into, not only his sci-fi brain, but the Amory Wars concept as a whole. Lines like;

“There’s no running away from what we’ve done here, will you sink with this ship or will you burn it down? Now give us the man you’ve been hiding cause this is your life now.”

Feel like they are part of the universe he’s crafted. In fact the concepts of parent having to leave child are something we’ve seen from him in the comics for the band’s second record. It makes sense that, with four records and now being a parent under his belt he’s able to convey this concept in a more potent way.

I’m not the biggest fan of “Young Love.” It’s very clear to me that the lyrics here are quite personal and so I don’t really want to cut them down. What I will say is the track puts me off right away with these guitar tones that are trying so hard to sound old and vintage that they come off cheesy. There is, however, a strong transition into “You Got Spirit, Kid” with this very mellow track leading way for a much grander one in the lead single.

“The Audience” is some of the most abysmal writing this band has ever done. The lyrics especially are downright awful see opening sequence;

“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m the lie you use. When surrounded by snakes and talking sharks be mindful the words you use.”

I can’t tell if this is a failed attempt to recreate Shakespear or if he’s trying to conjure up the wit of a 2007 FaceBook post. That and in the pre-chorus there had to have been a better way to turn that phrase than referencing sexual assault. Musically it isn’t much better there is a cool breakdown that’s gone way too soon and a drum outro that takes forever. I actually remember around the time this record dropped there was an entire article revering this song as the band’s greatest yet and to me it never stood out but now in retrospect I feel it's one of their worst.

In contrast, when this record was current I remember not enjoying “Peace to the Mountain” but I’m sort of into it this time around. There’s a lot of cowboy blues feels, Sanchez is singing about this need for solitude as well as an ache that drives him to drink. The intro to the track has a rolling mountain theme and the more it picks up, the more western it sounds. When we get to the end of the track and record we do all these big grand things like using horns and strings and while I don’t love that it fades out it sounds like an appropriate ending and a bit Beetles inspired.

The Color Before the Sun, to me, feels like a band very much getting their groove back. As a result of the environment it was birthed in it feels more like a rock record than a prog, or post-hardcore or whatever you classify this band as. Outside of the environment though, Sanchez was just focused on other things, life at home, being a new parent. Which, he has confirmed is present on this upcoming record, A Window of the Waking Mind, but as far as 2015 goes it felt like he had this inner need to face these changes without the crutch of a concept. On Afterman, I talked about how there were a lot of safer songs that worked regardless of a lack of risks just because the scope of the whole thing was so grand, and if I were to pick out the record’s deepest flaw it’s that all the good songs are safe and all the good ideas are present on dud songs. While I can’t say all that much bad about the record there’s also not a lot for me to praise even all these years later, there just isn’t a lot of substance. A lot of it just feels like pretty fair deep cuts and not a collection that can stand very high in its own right. When I review albums there’s always a song or two I don’t include in the track-by-track and on this record it's the lead single, sort of speaks to the whole issue, no?

The whole mission statement of this mini series was to figure out why I don’t listen to these albums in regular rotation and I’ve think I accomplished that. For Black Rainbow its that the record is an overall negative listening experience, for Color its that its neither positive or negative. As for Afterman? I enjoyed it more now and have since started throwing it on casually! If you’ve stuck with this as a fan of Coheed or any other reason, thank you for sticking with me. My name is Aster and I post on this blog every Monday. Next week as it is the first Monday of the month we will be doing a micro review post where we gauntlet-style four records from the previous month. After that we have four more current album reviews already in the works. If you stick around till about the end of June, I’ll review the new Coheed as well.

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