In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3

 How do punchy guitar duels, the staccato and rough-cut brilliance of System Of A Down’s songwriting, and the epic, tantric sprawl of an aesthetic like Mars Volta’s grab you? In the opening sum, subtract the politics and the unwavering artiness of metaphorical philosophizing, and the result you might have been after is staring you in the face. If the differences between those two bands seem so unbridgeable that you can hardly imagine tossing both into the same bowl of your musical taste, then Coheed And Cambria are the missing link in the evolutionary chain, the one that manages to fill the gap between the two hemispheres of your brain. They’ve dug out the choicest bits from both and underlined it all with a pop, radio-friendly undertone.

Their third record, In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3, doesn’t betray that principle either. They put it together in 2003 for the small label Equal Vision Records Inc, which around then was attracting growing interest from the major Sony BMG, so you no longer have to dig too deep into your pocket for phenomenal albums. With In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3, Coheed And Cambria built a concept album that’s sharp and SOAD-style ruffled, and the wild tempo outbursts and guitar lines don’t run out of steam too soon on any track. Mars Volta are here only for comparison, because I can’t think of a single song where they managed to squeeze their story into less than five or six minutes. Guitarist and crystal-clear tenor Claudio Sanchez joins forces here once again with guitarist Travis Stever, bassist Michael Todd and drummer Joshua Eppard, while the balance of the whole thing was smoothed out by the producer-visionary duo Birnbaum – Bittner. The record kicks off with a ringing phone and the clatter of women’s shoes on parquet in a hallway. Instead of the usual cliché barrage of empty words, we get music that sounds like an opening flight over the scorched plains of Mordor. And then the real start. ‘In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3’ reaches for the already familiar guitar phrase from SOAD’s ‘Toxicity’, but Coheed win you over with the difference: Sanchez’s vocals are less barking and pitched higher, flirting straight with Cedric’s line of vocal meditation. We humans are glued to our consoles, wandering through everyday life technocratically estranged. Work becomes routine, one in which we’re an extension of the machine, and in our free time we switch over to home computers to unwind and live someone else’s life in front of a keyboard, while typed messages replace spoken words. Between people, what remains is unspoken words, unlived emotions and the noise of time running out. “Awake through motion / With curiosity to curtain your first move / Over arms Length They’ll Break Protocol / Jealous envy for the youngest one / To be the hero is all I’ll ask / Can I be buried here among the dead, with room to honor me here in the end?” Sanchez’s lyrics are methodically wrapped metaphors documenting the lives and longing of everyone who’s still alive and feeling. Society needs ideals and the comfort of unconditional love. Its tribute to the idea of perfection and, if you like, a true god is offered up as the solution, and Coheed And Cambria squeeze their tribute to the Eternal, the Just and the Loving into ‘Cuts Marked In The March Of Men’. Even a dialed-in frequency for a direct conversation, or the incarnation of the Savior on earth, is no solution for this society of doubters, but that’s understandable. We humans are imperfect and full of questions to which we can hardly find a satisfying answer. Sometimes the nightmare goes too far, and a bullet passing through the brain puts a stop to the annoying burden of humanity, and existence can be over in a moment. Coheed look for inspiration there too. ‘Three Evils (Embodied In Love And Shadow)’ is a tribute to the fragility and beauty of the pain of existing, and the pretty heavy subject matter is lightened by a pop line of ease and elegance that Coheed And Cambria instinctively follow from verse to verse. The road of disappointment and eternal longing continues into ‘The Crowing’, a disguised form of rage and revolt. It’s basically an almost-love song. Love is sometimes like the worst, incurable disease, where the price of sacrificing yourself is a feeling of emptiness and madness. The inner beauty of love twists into brutal undertones of disappointment and a desire for revenge. The present and harmony of the eternal I Love slip easily into something that was and is no more. Claudio goes through an inner catharsis by eliminating reminders that, by the principles of sharia law, only death and an eye-for-an-eye revenge can remove. “In short for the murders of those I court I bless the hour that holds your fall / Sincerely, I will kill you all”. The story carries on in the lovely little ditty ‘Blood Red Summer’, which keeps the tears flowing so you can catch your breath one last time before the gigantic mouthful Coheed serve up next, in the form of a triptych of epic proportions. ‘The Camper Velorium’ is a three-part symphony of rock brilliance, and for many a conceptual exhaustion. The first part, ‘The Camper Velorium I: Faint Of Hearts’, is a five-minute engraving of pop idyll, love and quiet regret that the adored one isn’t sleeping close beside the lover. Veiled sexuality is just one of the layers Coheed blew into the creamy, airheaded pumping of sweet melodies. For a lullaby, which is what they label it line after line, the track is like a ton of sugar that you drench in caramel and top with powdered sugar, and the reaction you get after this part is a total purge (read: massive diarrhea), one that anyone who has ever truly loved has no intention of giving up by even an inch. ‘The Camper Velorium II: Backend Of Forever’ is far more appealing and whisperingly restrained, and it reflects Sanchez’s true intentions better, the ones hiding behind a blinding white smile. A manic, latent psychopathic killer scares off lovely fluffy-headed girls, doesn’t he? The gauzy veil of everyday nonsense pushes Sanchez to drastic measures. The song is an explanation of the reasons, piled up in carefully measured heaps. “This isn’t love so forever let it go…/ Forever sill it burn/ This isn’t love there on the backend of forever / I wish I would never hurt again”. Is it just a goodbye or something else? It’s about a killer awakened anew, brutally settling accounts with the causes of his disappointment. ‘The Camper Velorium III: Al The Killer’ is the dance of a schizophrenic on a bad trip. A schizophrenic who launches into a headlong run into the unknown sea of endless emptiness. Vacuum. Empty phrases. That’s the dose of felt emotion they hammer in again and again on ‘A Favor House Atlantic’, the first real album filler on this record. As if the guys in the band sensed it, they decided to write one last summary of everything said in the regular part of the record. The nine-minute meditation on the great ending is called ‘The Light & The Glass’, an acoustic cooling-down of overheated passions in which the sound of acoustic guitars and Sanchez’s almost feminine vocals intertwine sensually. The ballad is seasoned with just the right amount of pathos to easily brighten the day of any melancholy soul. Coheed And Cambria are simply the modern-day troubadours of Generation X. Or are they? After the end you get one last drop of hidden madness, which buzzes in after the finish as a hidden nine-minute track about yet another lost love. How can you be surprised?

Alienation. A buzzing phone. A crowd of girls decked out in glitter. Pop vacuum and rock ambition. The picture gets its final coat of paint, thanks to which what we see in the end makes more sense than it did at the start. After listening, I reached for the SOAD and Mars Volta albums again, and this time I’d rather play them separately to fix the taste in my mouth. After the most promising bite from Coheed And Cambria’s catalog of discographic commandments, and the mental effort of ignoring endless thick layers of sugary pop, I was left with the last atoms of my energy gone. I’ll need to swap the batteries, reset the processor and gulp down some disinfectant for the open wounds on my opening expectations, the ones that made me pick up the record in the first place, and I came away with a mild form of diabetes. Well, we learn from our mistakes. Or do we?