By Ben Richardson
November is upon us, and cult prog-emo masterminds Coheed and Cambria (Coheed for short) play the Warfield this week, touring behind their new album, Good Apollo, I’m a Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow (take that, Fiona Apple). The album – their fourth – serves as the concluding chapter in a sweeping back-story that has served as the fundament for the entire Coheed catalog, which chronicles the abstruse adventures of a pair of put-upon intergalactic badasses, “Coheed” and “Cambria.”
Hearing Coheed for the first time is a divisive experience, and I’ll confess that without something specific to latch onto I would have written them off based on the singing alone. Frontperson Claudio Sanchez favors a dulcet falsetto that often elicits comparisons to Geddy Lee, the similarly polarizing vocalist of Rush, and I was lucky to stumble upon a track on their first release that enabled me to allay my falsetto fears and gradually learn to appreciate Sanchez’s high-register crooning. The track is called “Delirium Trigger,” and it begins with this verse:
We’re now / Up here alone / Terror on the intercom / Can someone save us?
Systems malfunction / Blast it this damn machine / Over and out captain.
Something lurks / Creeps on the counter top / Somewhere behind you
Parasitic cyst / I can’t stand to watch / It’s coming up and out of your chest.
These lyrics combine with an eerie, plaintive 6/8 groove to create an atmosphere of dread, and, on the strength of that last line, start to sound a hell of a lot like the original cast recording of Alien: The Musical. As a huge fan of the Ridley Scott movie and its attendant sequels, I found my attention immediately piqued. Sure, the whole chest-bursting thing was a little derivative, but if you’re going to crib, shouldn’t you crib from the best?