Coheed & Cambria's A Window to the Waking Mind and leaving home
This is the last album review I outlined in my home state. I take these reviews very seriously, probably comically so for someone who isn’t making money off of them. I also get personal on these, they’re a form of therapy to me. Music is where I come to process and cry about complicated emotions. It’s where I go to unwind, feel my feelings, I don’t even get day-to-day work done without a record on. At the beginning of this blog I tried hard not to show my feelings that way. The first review on here is one of my favorite bands in the world and I tried to be such a stiff art critic about that. I saw how other people did it though and it made me less ashamed. I started recognizing that maybe if I get something out of art someone else could get something out of my reaction to it. They could latch onto the experience and as much as I can’t believe it, I have had that effect on people. I’ve had musicians reach out and be thrilled with the way I interpreted their work. I’ve had strangers online like what I said so much that they became a fan, bought a record, bought concert tickets. I’ve had people tell me reading about my experience enhanced their own, resonating with what I said made them feel joy or cry. For someone like me who feels like I’m just milking an emotional art piece by piggybacking off of someone else's art? That means the world.
That aside, it’s especially important that this is the last review out east. Without this band there is no AsterTracks. Like, sure, you could make the argument that maybe it would have happened eventually. When I got into music it was through a middle school friend that I met playing Yu-Gi-Oh. He showed me Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and the like. All of that was fine. Then one day, when I latched on to a different friend in the group and we started playing a ton of RockBand together on his XBox I heard a song called “Welcome Home.” That did me in. I was enthralled. I downloaded the four Coheed and Cambria records and all the Shabutie stuff off of LimeWire. I listened to nothing but those records for years. Now they have ten records, I own every single one and I stuck by this band as a fan even through albums I did not love. This being the sequel to Unheavenly Creatures, an album that I’m pretty sure was my 2018 album of the year, (though I wasn’t keeping score at the time) made me look forward to it especially.
Coheed’s albums always eerily mirror my life during the year they’re released. Sure, I had to stretch on the last Vaxis installment, but on this? It’s the most resonating feeling yet. During the past forty-something days I realized that my high school relationship that I was still in fourteen years later was killing me. I broke down, was picked back up by my chosen family. I packed my house up and flew out three thousand miles out to live with them. No plan of when I’d find a job and my only stability being them promising me a place to stay. The place I’m finishing this review in. I contended with very complicated emotions toward my family, my parents especially and came to terms with them not at all being the people I thought they were. In some ways they were worse, in some so much better than I gave credit for. In a lot of ways I’m even grateful this record was delayed. I don’t think I would have had this feeling toward it if it was released last month.
If you read this little intro thank you so much. I’m so glad I’m here. I’m so glad I get to connect this way with my favorite band. The review starts now.
I have a long standing theory in mind that there are three types of Coheed songs. The first is the emo pop anthems; your “Favor Houses,” your “Sufferings” even “Island” to a degree. The second is songs that are all lore and technical playing. The third type fits somewhere in the middle of these two ideologies and the first single “Shoulders” is that type of song. This is a performance driven southern rock cut whose riff does not stop for a split second during the three and a half minute run time. It paints a visual to me, not a narrative one, one of Coheed and Cambria playing the track. I can practically feel Claudio Sanchez spit in the opening, I can see the band leaning over each other and making eye contact. I’ve seen this band live enough to know what the visual of that guitar solo is. If you read my retrospective on The Color Before the Sun you may recall me saying that “Eraser” to me felt like this band getting back in their groove. “Shoulders” to me feels like this band enjoying themselves in their groove. All of these performances are so tight and more of a showing than anything in the discography going back years. I can see why this track was released roughly a year early. It’s incredible.
Lyrically the themes presented here talk of feeling stuck with someone in your life and them taking it out on you every single time they're upset. You want to leave but you stick with them because you feel like things could be so much worse. Now, full transparency, any story connections I draw here are not a result of me reading the book attached to this release. I am between homes, as I said, and my copy was shipped directly to my new address. That being said, I’m assuming this is in relation to the character with a head growing out of their shoulder. While I do not know what that’s like, I do know what it’s like to feel like someone is literally attached to you. To have them so entangled in your existence and even though you know it’s negative you feel like you could never shake them off so you bargain with your newfound existence.
As I said above; many Coheed songs find their focus lyrically on the concept and those songs tend to be more progressively inclined. The second single; “Rise, Naianasha (Cut the Cord)” is this shade of the band. Even without reading it I cannot imagine a world where these words are not lifted straight from the book and while I heavily criticized that on Year of the Black Rainbow, here it’s done brilliantly. The story being told on this track flows in a way where yes, there’s a lot of war strategies being discussed, there’s a lot of story mechanics being spouted, but there are also cohesive verses and choruses that all serve as a song you can enjoy without all that prior knowledge. On the fiction side though, with my loose interpretations I can draw, this one is interesting to me. On a track like “Blood” we find Creature discussing his son in a way where it’s almost as if he has never truly met him but to him it’s still his child, awake or not he still loves him. On this it sounds as if he is giving him life advice and warning him of a time where he will be without his family. There is also the main hook;
“Call me and I’ll be there
When you need your great destroyer.”
In a way this is the same promise Creature makes to his significant other on an earlier track of the story, which we’ll of course get to later. Be it to destroy all those who stand in their way, or destroy his own family so they cannot be used in a way they cannot consent to, either way this character is willing to take whatever form his loved ones need him to be.
As I said, instrumentally this is a real showing of this band’s ability to play. Similar to “Shoulders” there is a constant riff, sometimes muffled, sometimes just in one ear, either way its so well crafted as is the entire track. A lot of this song reminds me of the band’s third record From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness mixed with a song like “Everything Evil,” where a lot of this playing is just the band going off and jamming but it’s also image driven like it’s scoring a film I can’t quite see. That mixed with the chorus having Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth vibes is just a reminder that this band has grown on all fronts. We’re using strategies from the far reaches of our back catalog in fresh ways two decades later.
Before the official release of the record “The Liars Club” was my favorite song out this year and it’s still so good. The instrumentation and performances are so tight in a totally different way than they are on “Shoulders.” On that track there isn’t really a second to breathe but here they use very peaceful mid sections like the utilization of a xylophone for example. If “Cut the Cord” shows this band's growth, “Liars” shows their ability to just write a song. Vocally Sanchez is on fire, the scream, the soaring vocal outro, he just goes off. This is another one I can really relate to lyrically, this idea that avoiding the truth makes life easier to the point that you end up living by that for years. All these factors of your existence that you are fully aware need to be addressed but you don’t deal with them so they can’t cause the fallouts, the break ups, the leaving behind of your family. That pressure builds up and you recognize that the things that come with the truth will make you exhausted. In the end though, these things always come out, you can hate the way you arrived at the truth but in the end, didn’t you have to get there? Is lying really in service to anything or anybody? No. I suppose that’s the point.
*~ *~ *~
“Comatose” was the final single and while I didn’t really love it on release it’s grown to be a favorite of mine off the entire project and I see it now for what it truly is. This was the true single to what Vaxis II was, this 80s pop rock infused version of Coheed and Cambria. While they never truly commit to the bit they do take pieces from that influence and combine it with the progressive structures they’ve always been built on. This coincides also with the three song theory above and is among the poppiest tracks on the record. The hook is very strong and easy to sing along to and the instrumentation is it’s own brand of catchy. Something that puts a smile on my face from this one is the crowd cheering sound effect used twice in every chorus. It sounds like the cheap YouTuber sound effect or a PowerPoint slide and is pretty silly but makes the song work well, it’s almost as useful a tool as any relatable lyric. Speaking of, lyrically I think I resonate with this more than anyone holistic track on the entire record.
“Cause I’m so afraid to let you know I’m letting go
Oh, I’m such a mess baby, this games over
A one man prison and no one gets in.”
“There’s no more maybes, this is absolute
So don’t stop now today’s the day
I know it’s not what you want, it’s not what you want to hear
But what’s it really matter when your lost?”
When you’re in a relationship like the one I just exited you cannot escape the constant loop. Whether you recognize how you got there or not, someone controls you and your life is a series of walking over eggshells constantly. You can’t escape your jailer because you worry about what they’ll do in the aftermath. You can’t talk to a single soul about what’s making you unhappy because if you do they could find out. I resonate so much with that metaphor because I was there. I lived it. When Coheed and Cambria write a song about it? It makes more sense to me.
“We all go up in flames going out in style.”
When the record came out at midnight and I pressed play, the opening seconds of “The Embers of Fire” made my jaw drop. The lines from “Old Flames” returning, the keys being used to create something that is similar to “The Ring in Return.” This time around the band feels like they are using it in the way a film score uses a character theme as opposed to a motif to represent a recurring phenomenon. If I had to present any criticism of this moment it’s that I wish they completed the passage, but I do understand the art direction especially being sung by, who I presume, is Sanchez’s son Atlas.
The bridging “Beautiful Losers” sounds like a rather hopeful opener similar to the way “Island” was on TCBtS only here it’s much more cohesive to the record attached.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way out.”
This song is another that strikes a chord with me. Being in the small town I’m from I had a lot of concern for my own privacy, safety and ability to grow. Those closest to me always told me I would find a way out of there and how perfect a timing that I would during the course of consuming this very record. That line mixed with;
“In my empty eyes can I find the ‘me?’
The more I lie I find the truth I seek.”
Open the concepts of the record, to me, in a perfect way alongside the overall sonic direction of the song. It’s not overtly technical but it presents the non-bleak nature of the body of work. It’s also a song in general that I think this band has tried in the past but hasn’t always been successful with.
I’ve seen a lot of talk from casual listeners of the record saying how upset they are that “A Disappearing Act” is the best song from this band they’ve ever heard and it wasn’t a single. While the band is now remedying that by preparing a music video for the track, I have to agree with that sentiment, it’s at least in the top five of all time. This track completely gives way to pop influences between the synthesizers, the autotune, even the dance number toward the end. Here, Coheed and Cambria are just having fun and as a fan? That’s all I could really ask. All I want out of my favorite bands is for them to enjoy their record and when a prog rock band wants to write a dance pop song and it’s done this well? I’ll take it every time. Since release I’ve thought about this track’s entire run time constantly, it may be my favorite track of the year.
As I have not been subtle about at all for the past few weeks, recently I’ve been going through a break up that I never thought would come from a partner I’ve been with since my early teens. The catalyst of which, (though, let’s be honest, it was coming anyway) was on a vacation to the town that, as you read this, I now reside in. I went to visit my best friend, who I’ve also mentioned a lot here lately and over the course of our week together we grew a lot closer, confided in each other a lot. I told her things I thought I would keep buried for the rest of my life. I cried real, full tears in front of her and she wiped them physically with her thumb, a feeling I still feel when I’m stressed enough to cry to this day. She promised me in a park that she’d never hurt me the way the people from my past did. For the first time in my life I trusted in that. I knew then, though I didn’t know what, that there was much more to the unhappiness I felt at home than I ever thought.
“How long have you waited here
For someone to touch you?
For someone to hear you scream?
It’s okay to be afraid
I’m here with you.”
How long had I waited? Evidently a long, long time.
“Love Murder One” to me is the band really giving way to the rock side of the influence they’re exploring on this record. In terms of vocal delivery and sound direction so much of this takes me to a place in my mind that most 80s pop rock takes me. A place of driving through the city at night, it’s what that genre is to me. Especially when you throw in songwriting tools like the heart thump effect and the atmosphere the rhythm section creates in the first verse. To me though, a lot of this is looking into a genre I do not truly have much experience with.
“Bad Man” is another interesting one for the similar vibes it paints compared to “Love Murder” but in a different way. This is very inspired by the artists of the timeframe I keep referencing, it even has the drum fill. I also am loving the production here especially when listening to the track with headphones, the way that “call your mother” reverberates from ear to ear is a powerful callback. Speaking of, this entire song really serves as a great character study into Creature himself. Again, not totally familiar with this story yet, but to me this is what Creature is as a character; A man who cares so deeply that to both survive and provide for his loved ones he becomes an intimidating criminal. A bad man as it were. While I don’t have the full scope of this, I do not think a Coheed song has personified a character from the fictional universe since the “Key Entity Extractions” and it might even do it better than that.
“Our Love” has interlude energy but I both acknowledge and respect it as an important part of the entire experience. What I like most sonically about this one is that it serves as the perfect separation between the record and it’s finale having gone from this very atmospheric and well crafted prog track to a song that’s just keys and vocals. That finale has been highly praised in these few weeks and to have this as calm before the three track run makes it a key part of the experience. Lyrically there is no better word I can offer you for what this is other than poetry.
“Our love won’t surrender to the odds up against us
No, but there’s something about this
I know we can’t miss
Let’s take a chance on forever.”
That opener as well as lines that resonate within the world of the characters of this universe paint something I love about Sanchez’s writing as it’s improved over the years. He did not come up with sentiments like the following passage by writing a story, he wrote them by feeling that way and he’s developed a style where artistically they work as either or.
“I’ll be better once the arrow hits heart
Give you the wedding that you want
You are so out of my league
I’ll be your guide when you want to get lost
Be the sword at your side at all costs.”
That line is so sweet but also so powerful. This promise that not only will you be there for someone forever in whatever form they need but you will also be the danger that they need. The world is a fucking scary place and if you can be with someone that can be both the comfort and weapon for you? To fight against those who would stand to fight against you? Stick with that, hold onto it as long as you can.
*~*~*~
While listening to “Ladders of Supremacy” for notes it occurred to me that I’m a little at a loss for words. The best way I can describe this one is by the artwork that corresponds with it; its scope is a monument in space. It’s huge and sounds like a sci-fi rock opera. I’m going to state again that I do not actually know the connection to the storyline, but here it feels to me like Sanchez is taking the role of a James Bond-esque villain giving what they believe to be their victory speech. A lot of his melodies here roll well with that sentiment; snarky, sure of himself that he’s won.
“Stay down boy, see ya got clowned boy
You got heart but sorry just ain’t meant to be
Another one down the ladders of supremacy.”
This track is the beginning of the end of the record; that three track run I mentioned above. In similar ways to “The Willing Well” (these riffs even remind me of From Fear) and suites like it before them they feel like the end of a story arc and a worthy finale to this chapter. They feel final in a way we never got on Unheavenly Creatures.
For months I expected the transition between “Ladders” and “Cut the Cord” to ruin me as a music fan. I was so right. What’s funny about this is the transition isn’t even anything incredibly profound, it’s just synth keys and they go into the next track. It’s more so that they go so seamlessly that it feels like a single song. In fact these whole last three tracks feel so cohesive like they should be one singular twenty minute epic. I wouldn’t question it if they were. The same way “The Willing Well” tracks are all so huge and have changing parts and choruses and yet they work perfectly as a body of work as well as individual pieces. It’s the best way the band has ever pulled off a finale.
Finally, the title track.
This song is cut into six sections, the first of which, “Time,” is simply acoustic guitar and strings, but the role Sanchez plays here is quite interesting. He comes in to say that the ending of this story is not what the listener thinks it is, leaving me fascinated as to what truly happens. From there he switches modes to that of Creature and wonders who his child will become throughout the course of his life, wonders if he even really needs to know yet. For me, this duality moves me. Sanchez obviously wrote this about his own son and is saying that as a parent he knows that whatever his child becomes is for them to decide but who they are right now is something worth protecting. It’s interesting how these three roles come together here.
The second section “The Awakening” is interesting as well because here we get an instrumental that appears to be the Coheed of old meeting halfway with the Coheed of new. It sounds intense and like it’s supposed to present a painting, but it also sounds atmospheric and grand.
It was around “Birth” that I started to recognize how deep this composition went. This one is a song within a song; it even has its own independent verses and choruses right in the middle of the track as a whole. We also make use of the piano chords from “The Gutter,” a song off of Unheavenly Creatures, in a story callback that goes off incredibly. In that song there is the passage;
Mother, come on out, show me what this world is all about
We’ll keep counting on your
We’ll keep fighting for you”
But here, in the instrumental recall, the lyrics are;
“Our pride and joy are you there?
Are you in there, safe and sound?
Tell us what you need so we can help you
We don’t know what to do.”
The “Mirroring Eyes” section reminds me of Afterman as well. On those records sound design was a huge part of the story telling and here it almost comes back to that. In fact, I think that the sounds used in this part of the track is the same sound effect as the atmosphere of the Keywork. That’s what it reminds me of, at least. That and the delivery toward the end really reminds me of the more dramatic theatrical cuts from those and even Year of the Black Rainbow.
“So life gets tough
But it’s no excuse or your fault.”
Life is hard, yours is going to be hard simply because you are here. Don’t use that as an excuse to get away with being a bad person but remember also that you are not burying yourself simply by being alive. This line from “The Mother” mixed with the entirety of “The Father” is what Afterman was trying to be. It sounds like it could be presented by the entire cast of a play and yet even with one man singing it? It sounds beautiful. That delivery of “it’s okay to cry” along with the lines after it may be Sanchez’s best delivery ever. It’s the perfect send off. It sounds like when the sentiment of a movie or video game trailer makes you cry except you get the feeling at the end of the body of work. Then the orchestral version of “Old Flames” sets us up well for the future of this band. It makes me truly believe in the fact that they could do three more records of this and keep it fresh every time.
This one is sort of tough for me to listen to. I have difficult relationships with both of my parents. They’ve both hurt me in a lot of ways throughout the years. Between that and the slow burning acceptance that they’ll never truly understand who I am? They might not even accept it? It makes me want to keep a general distance, which is pretty easy at three thousand miles, but still. At the same time I would love parental love and guidance. I would love to connect with who I came from. At this moment though I don’t think I really can. In fact, six months ago I tried to connect with one of them and it didn’t go well. I’ve shed real tears over it every day. It’s hard for me to understand parents like Sanchez, who write an entire record about their need to nurture and protect their children. It feels so alien to me. In a way though, it fills me with joy knowing not everyone is going through what I am.
I’ve made my case for why this record is great. So to close this out I want to offer a little perspective as a fan. You saw how long I’ve loved this music above. A while ago I did a piece on my top ten albums of all time. I have considered No World for Tomorrow my favorite album by this band and my second favorite album at all for years. I’m a bit weary to say this but it may finally, fifteen years later, have been beaten. I am so happy with this. I have not put it down even after finishing the notes for this write up and in a way finishing this feels almost like an ending of its own. I love this record, I love this band and this was a perfect way to close this chapter.
Both for Vaxis himself and me moving forward.
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