Coheed and Cambria - Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind (June 24, 2022) Album • Page 42

Putting this on for the first time.

Embers: “oh ok…hmmm wow…(00:52 hits) WHAT THE FUCK!?!??”
Beautiful Losers first chorus hits: (my face superimposed on the Super Sayain meme)

 

Prog has to be one of the most ill defined terms in music, and I say that as someone guilty of using it all the time.

My hot take: the first three records are king not because they're "more prog," but because they developed and fleshed out an original, innovative sound (or blend of sounds, at minimum) that had intricate, captivating layers of guitar work and sometimes weird song structures. Is that prog? No idea. NWFT, by contrast, sounds like it's falling back into a specific trope that already existed before Coheed: 80s metal/prog metal. So it sounded more like what used to be prog long before, but was a lot less interesting.

Post-NWFT, it's just really hard to decide what qualifies as their proggier songs, other than the three-chord anthems with no interesting guitar work clearly being non-prog.

 

ok i regret making my incendiary post :|

 

A DISAPPEARING ACT

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS

 

I’m onto GA1 in my discog run and god damn it if you don’t head any at any point during Welcome Home you are not one among the mfin fence

 

Welcome to the club!

 

The liars club

huehuehuehuehuehuehuehuehue

 

Jarring in a bad way

 

i love the album version of “mother superior” :|

 

It’s good but not as good as that video

 

It's literally one of my favorite songs they've released. It develops so nicely, it's a really weird one to hate on.

 

The prog discussion is hard to have since the definition is so broad, but for me with Coheed I try to remember that heavy and/or long does not equal prog. To me, it’s more about off kilter riffs (think NWFT, Rise Naianasha) different passages that subvert normal song structure (Domino, The Gutter), and songs that start one way and end in a totally different place (The Crowing, Black Sunday). I don’t think whether the song is catchy or not has a lot of bearing in my mind on if it’s prog or not, because it’s always catchy, there’s always repeated melodies.

I do agree that GA:1 isn’t the prog opus it’s looked back on as, and it’s really just Welcome Home, Apollo I, and The Willing Wells. I don’t think NWFT is more prog. It has riffs for days, but I think it’s generally more straightforward, outside of the title track and The End Complete.

 

I prefer it now. I think saving the “Mother superior, come catch the rabbit he runs” for the climax/bridge was a great change, it was just weird at first to hear how bombastic and produced it was after listening to the acoustic version for so long.

 

again, very casual coheed fan here that hasn’t been able to get this song out of my head since yesterday.

I know it’s a bad single choice since it doesn’t really represent the rest of the album (that I’ve heard anyway), but it really should be a single. Sounds like an alt radio hit to me

 

I think it’s the next song that will get pushed. Claudio played it and uploaded it to tik tok and they played it live at the intimate release day show.

 

I agree with a lot of this and I don’t blame the band for not wanting to be given a singular label like “prog” or to be considered the new Rush. The more I expose myself to prog or watching drummers incorporate a lot of intricate, complex rhythms of different styles and genres (I play drums so I expose myself to watching them rather than guitars, bass, etc), the more I realize that Coheed has never been as prog as a lot of people have considered them to be, myself included. They absolutely have their songs and their moments, but they aren’t out here routinely playing non very weird time signatures with odd song structures.

What I will give them is that they have done an incredible job at making much more digestible prog-influenced music and I really value that because they (and Circa Survive, for that matter) have helped introduce me to some really cool bands from a style of music that I admittedly don’t listen to very often because of how taxing it can be to do so as a listener. I think their first three albums have their moments, as does YOTBR, but they’ve been much more tame in that department otherwise. With that said, I’m cool with that because I’m a big fan of the Afterman albums and Vaxis 1, as well as Vaxis 2 (though I’ve only listened to it two or three times so I’m still formulating my opinion on it).

Again, that’s why I love when this band is able to nail the balance of all their different sounds. There’s so much I love about Coheed that I don’t want an album that only focuses on one or two of those things. I want it all haha

 

I actually got into coheed with NWFT in a way, I knew the singles from GA1 and IKS quite well but didn’t have either album. I bought NWFT when it came out as my first coheed record and loved every second of it. I was only 15

 

This is very similar for me, but with YOTBR instead. I knew some of the hits from IKS, GA1, and NWFT, but YOTBR was the first album from them I actually listened to in full

 

got into them from Welcome Home being on Rock Band lol

 

I saw the Welcome Home video on MTV and it blew my mind. I went to buy the cd, but FYE only had Second Stage Turbine Blade. I brought it up north on my discman and listened on the long car ride. Good times.

 

Rock Band was also my entry way for this band lmao

 

Lol when I started playing world of Warcraft in 06 welcome home was on my like 20 song playlist I used when I played. To this day any song that was on it makes me wanna play it again

 

When I was 13 an older kid in my church youth group played IKS while we were on a trip. I remember thinking Claudio sounded weird but that the epic factor piqued my interest. I remember listening to Slipknot’s Vol. 3 a lot on that trip, haha. I bought IKS at Walmart after hearing AFHA a couple more times on Fuse.

 

Not to brag but my first time seeing them was Neverender night 1 in NYC.

 

I saw them in 2010 with porcupine tree and the dear hunter and in 2019 with mastodon and ETID. Can’t wait for the show this summer it’s the day after my birthday