Review: Coheed And Cambria - Year Of The Black Rainbow

Coheed And Cambria have always been a couple steps away from your typical rock band.  While most of the band’s peers in the alternative/punk/whatever-you-want-to-call-it scene would be content to release album after album filled with suitably fist-pumping guitar riffs and catchy choruses, C&C have bigger things in mind - like, for instance, crafting a five-album-long epic sci-fi narrative told from the viewpoints of a wide cast of characters and spanning decades of storyline.  If nothing else, these guys are sure ambitious.  But what comes first - the story or the music that’s telling it?  For the most part, C&C’s music has been a perfect match for their storytelling ambitions, both complementing each other and creating satisfying results.  But for the first time in the band’s career, 2010’s Year Of The Black Rainbow sees the scale tipping in the direction of conceptual grandeur, which is all well and good, except that it comes at the sacrifice of the actual music.

Year Of The Black Rainbow is something of an oddity in C&C’s catalog for both musical and conceptual reasons.  For starters, in terms of the story’s progression, this is a “prequel” album - rather than continuing the established (if hopelessly convoluted) storyline set in motion by previous albums, this album goes back to the very beginning of the story in George-Lucas-like fashion and tells of the origin of well-established characters and events.  Aside from the many reasons this is rarely a good storytelling idea (and being a massive movie/TV/book geek in addition to a music nerd, I could go into those in great detail; for the sake of space here, though, I’ll spare you from that particular rant), this narrative backtracking gives the whole album a forced, pre-decided feeling - the constraints placed on the direction of the story seem to bleed through and put similar constraints on the music, precluding any serious progression in songcraft.  It’s as if Claudio Sanchez, the band’s lead singer/guitarist/lyricist/general mastermind, felt obligated to go back and tell this part of the story instead of being genuinely inspired to do so, and painstakingly forced out an album’s worth of musical material just to serve as a vessel for his narrative.  Which is a pity, because Sanchez has written some damn catchy songs in his career.  On YOTBR, however, catchy hooks are few and far between, and compelling lyrics to sing along to are even rarer.

Spotty writing aside, YOTBR is also hampered by some highly questionable production choices.  The mixing throughout most of the album seems muddy and poorly defined, a sharp contrast to the clear, satisfying mixing of the band’s last few outings.  All the intricate guitar work and touches of keyboard and sound design are simply a chore to pick out of the mix, rather than being enjoyable to listen to.  In certain places, the presence of electronics and other Pro Tools touches are just a little overbearing, such as “Guns Of Summer,” with its programmed industrial-breakbeat rhythms overpowering the positive aspects of what would otherwise have been one of the stronger songs on the album.  To put it simply, the mixing and over-production makes the album much more difficult to listen to than it should be.  There are some bright spots on YOTBR, however - Sanchez’s songwriting skills aren’t entirely absent.  Single “World Of Lines” is a short, satisfying blast of energetic prog-punk, and one of the album’s most fun songs to listen to.  Another highlight is the pulsing, down-tempo quasi-ballad “Far,” an instance in which the album’s abundance of studio sound-design techniques actually works in favor of the music instead of obfuscating it.  These tracks, along with a couple others - “When Skeletons Live,” “Made Out Of Nothing (All That I Am),” and “In The Flame Of Error” are all fairly enjoyable pieces from the latter half of the album - are, unfortunately, exceptions to the rule.  C&C’s future is uncertain at this point.  According to Sanchez, this  chapter of the story is the last that needs to be told.  Will the band continue writing music around its grandiose concept, move on to other, more accessible subjects, or simply dissolve and pursue other projects?  No one knows at this point - perhaps not even Sanchez and company.  If this does end up being the last album from C&C, however, it’ll be a shame that they couldn’t have exited on a higher note.

Rating: 2.5/5

Standout Tracks:
“World Of Lines”
“Far”
“When Skeletons Live”
“In The Flame Of Error”

Release Date: April 13, 2010