Year of the Black Rainbow - Addendum

Ok, to be honest, the album isn't a total loss. There are some good tracks on it, but they're few and far between in my opinion. "The Broken" is excellent as the album's anthem track and "Here We Are Juggernaut" has grown on me. There was at least one, maybe two others that seemed like they might catch on with me as well, but all the slow songs (Far, Pearl of the Stars) were dull and almost grating and the album's one epic song "The Black Rainbow" was hardly epic at all, relying on a repetitious riff to carry it's nearly 8 minutes. And as mentioned in my previous post, I'm just overall turned off by the dull sound of the mix. The low end gets lost in the mud and the mid-high end is almost entirely mixed to feature the vocals, so everything ends up sounding flat to me as I can't hear the layering and depth I expect from a Coheed & Cambria album.

There's also a chance that I'm being a little harsh on the album because of the sequencing. To me it ends up sounding like an industrial wanna-be, similar to late 90's early 2000's acts like Kidney Theives and similar goth rock outfits. I spent most of college listening to nothing but industrial music, bands like: KMFDM, Front Line Assembly, and Skinny Puppy. I have a specific industrial sound that I like and a specific sound that really grates on me. The industrial tinge of Year of the Black Rainbow is the kind of sound that grates on me. Also, I'm very much over industrial music at this point in time. It was a phase in my life between mostly pop music and mostly punk and while I can still go back and listen to some of it, I don't do so very often and I certainly don't get into any new industrial. As far as I'm concerned (like real emo music) there hasn't been any good industrial made since around 2000 or so.

Year of the Black Rainbow is an album of experimentation, it's a band trying new things to spark inspiration and that's good, but I almost wish that Claudio had done a solo album (another Prize Fighter album maybe) after No World for Tomorrow instead of jumping into another Coheed album. Side projects are great for trying new things and giving you new ideas to bring to your main project. Experimental releases for an existing band are always tough to swallow, especially if the experimentation is not to your liking.

In the end I've still got 4 amazing albums from this band though and they will always be good live. We'll see what they come up with in the future though, hopefully less sequencing and more depth.