YEAR OF THE BLACK RAINBOW

When I first listened to this album back when it came out, I kinda glossed over it, seeing it as just another album in the release schedule and throwing it in the back of my music library. Having seen it there for all these years I decided to give it a couple of listens to actually get my actual opinion on this. After all, I listen to all of their previous releases on a near-regular basis, so why not this one? Turns out, there's some very good reasons why I threw it out.

For starters, it's not really very Coheedesque, and it suffers for that. Where the prominent and delicious guitar riffs would be, they replaced it with more drums, which are fine, but not really engaging at all. Where are the guitars now? Shoved in the back and doing less cool riffing and more mindless shredding and it too fails to engage at any level past "oh hey, that's kind of cool". All of this really just leads to an album that if you don't pay direct attention to, will make from 0:00 to 54:02 be entirely uneventful.

The production sounds really muddled, everything just kind of fuses into everything else with only Claudio popping up sometimes like in "The Broken" or "Far", but even he becomes a huge part of the blob. It takes a special kind of production to make the thing that your brain is built to focus on not be focused.

A lot of the songwriting here is a lot duller than your usual Coheed fare, too. There was never really a dull moment in any of the other albums, but now we have a couple of songs that have absolutely nothing going for them. One of the biggest offenders is Made Out of Nothing, which is just a couple of muttered verses and a chorus repeated ad nauseum like a dull 80's power ballad. The big supposed rocker "Here We Are Juggernaut" barely rocks too, suffering from the "throw the riffs under the bus syndrome" leaving the only bite to come out of Claudio's delivery of the chorus, and just can't hold it up alone.

The story is good in and of itself and if you're an Amory Wars fan or just a huge Coheed fan, you'll prolly enjoy it. If you're looking into Coheed and Cambria, go get In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth or Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV and steer clear from this. You'll be bored to tears otherwise.