Album Review: Coheed and Cambria - 'The Father Of Make Believe'
Coheed and Cambria have rushed back onto the airwaves with their eleventh studio album, ‘The Father Of Make Believe’ — and it’s everything a fan could hope for.
Coheed and Cambria are quite an intimidating band to get into. With thirty years and soon-to-be eleven studio albums under their respective belts, there’s a lot of ground to cover — and that’s not even touching upon the rest of the band’s heady catalogue of media. But, throughout, they’ve stayed true to themselves. Even when they’ve evolved, developed both their sound and themselves as a band, the changes have been consistent — which is ideal for a band with just so many stories to tell.
‘Vaxis — Act III: The Father Of Make Believe’ is no different. The third part of the band’s most recent saga — also encompassing 2018’s ‘Vaxis — Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures’ and 2022’s ‘Vaxis — Act II: A Window Of The Waking Mind’ — the band’s latest offering somehow manages to tread new ground while also manipulating all the same elements that have given them such a devoted fanbase.
And yet the opener feels almost jarring, particularly compared to the singles. ‘Yesterday’s Lost’, a minute long piano piece which leads into the gentle strum of guitar, feels almost… quaint. Underpinned by some strings, all before Claudio Sanchez’s voice trickles in, as delicate and soft as a wisp of cloud vapour, the track’s a far throw from what you might expect — though who doesn’t love a welcome surprise. ‘Goodbye, Sunshine’, in contrast. feels more like the start of the album proper — even if, at the same time, it feels painfully like a goodbye. After the beautiful, contemplatively cinematic intro, you’re thrown straight into Josh Eppard’s drums and the low thrum of Travis Stever and Zach Cooper’s instrumentals — and then the chorus hits, and you know you’re firmly back in Coheed and Cambria territory. There’s a few flashes of theatrical flair — or, at least, more flashes of theatrical flair than usual for the band that, over the course of eleven studio albums, have brought to life the extensive and honestly dauntingly expansive ‘The Amory Wars’ series — and, much like 2022’s predecessor ‘Vaxis - Act II: A Window Of The Waking Mind’, the track leans a little heavier towards the band’s poppier elements than the likes of the seven plus minute long proggy epics sprinkled into their discography, but it’s undeniably theirs. The gentle souring of the final note, ushering the album on, only signals what’s to come — and that’s ’Searching For Tomorrow’, the album’s second single. Stever’s guitar solo takes centre-stage here, the piercing and warbling strings adding that extra layer of urgency to Sanchez’s impassioned, grave cries. There’s title track ‘The Father of Make Believe’, feeling particularly rock opera-esque in its immersive instrumentals, residing somewhere between a call to action and an ode to hope. There’s the lead single ‘Blind Side Sonny’, which having been previously described as a ‘two-minute, thrash-adjacent metal ripper’, Sanchez’s distorted screams sounding not dissimilar from fellow 2000trees’ headliner Alexisonfire’s George Pettit, lives up to its own hype, the chorus near-mocking in tone as if to laugh at anyone disparaging Coheed and Cambria’s tonal shift in recent years. ‘Play the Poet’, immediately after, sounds like it’d slot seamlessly into a an early 2000s nu-metal album, Sanchez’s acerbic rage bubbling over.
But there’s also a lot more overt poignancy and openness throughout the album. Not that there hasn’t been before — indeed, as is often the case, the band’s varied discography has often touched upon the band’s own lives, under the guise of the futuristic, dystopian world they’d created. Yet this most recent album seems to see the facade stripped away. There’s ‘Meri Of Merci’, a beautiful piano track that comes halfway into the album and sees the return of the inspiration for Sirius and Meri Amory (a couple chronicled throughout the band’s discography but particularly in 2012’s ‘The Afterman’), Sanchez’s late grandparents — his recently passed grandpa reuniting with the woman he had lost 40 years prior; there’s ‘Corner My Confidence’, essentially a heartfelt sonnet put to music, written on the band’s biennial ‘Coheed Cruise’ the S.S. Neverender.
And then there’s the quartet of ‘The Continuum’ tracks, coming in almost as their own little project stapled on. ‘Welcome to Forever, Mr. Nobody’ comes up first, featuring a cheeky little cameo on Claudio’s part with some Freddy Krueger finger-clashing — possibly a tall ask live, but Spencer Charnas and Ice Nine Kills seem to pull it off handily — while the band fly into action, full of layer upon layer of action-crammed instrumentation, before the six-and-a-bit minute epic of ‘The Flood’ gushes into frame. The slower track meanders at first, drip-feeding the prog-metal elements while Sanchez’s more contemplative vocals float above — and then it all comes crashing down, guitar riffs cascading all around you as you struggle to stay afloat. This ebb and flow never really ceases, ripples of calm broken by a crashing stone of feeling.
And then the final duo of ‘Tethered Together’ and ‘So It Goes’ seem the perfect way to end the just-short-of-an-hour album. ‘Tethered Together’
First track is almost suspenseful, Sanchez’s whispers over an increasingly urgent guitar line, as if to embody a fuse slowly running out of rope — and then it’s time for the explosion, Sanchez’s solemn, resolute promise that “we’ll all sing together / from the first verse to the last word” roaring over the soaring chorus.
‘So It Goes’, meanwhile, leaves things on a nicely happy not, a musical volta to its album-mates’ pervasive feeling of anxiety. It feels more like a track from Jeff Lynne’s ELO, or perhaps an early Panic! At The Disco single, rather than from the same group that brought you ‘Vic the Butcher’ — but the jaunty little tune works. It serves as a joyful contrast to the rest of the album, with its final little orchestral piece giving the album an almost Howard Shore-esque sendoff. Letting it snake back to the start of the album, then, puts the album in an almost ouroboric state, the grandeur of ‘So It Goes’ giving way to the comparatively twinkling ‘Yesterday’s Lost’, and letting you start the whole adventure over again.
With another three of the tracks receiving their debut airings (now totalling five!) on Tuesday’s intimate concert at the Irving Plaza in NYC — which was also streamed live on VEEPS worldwide — it remains to be seen how the songs end up integrating into Coheed and Cambria’s live show… but however it ends up, it’s sure to be brilliant.
Words by James O’Sullivan
