COHEED & CAMBRIA - The Unheavenly Creatures Vinyl (2018)

Coheed and Cambria came back in 2018 with the most Coheed and Cambria album imaginable, a sprawling prog-metal space opera that picks up the Amory Wars saga right where it left off and immediately throws you into the deep end. If you never left, you were ready. If you drifted and came back, The Unheavenly Creatures is the kind of record that makes you feel like you owe it an apology.

Spanning twelve tracks and nearly an hour of runtime, this is the band at full stretch, Claudio Sanchez doing things vocally that have no business working as well as they do over riffs that swing between post-hardcore crunch and full arena-rock momentum. The 3 LP coloured vinyl pressing with etching is the correct way to own this one, the format matches the ambition of the thing. Alternative rock and progressive metal rarely pull off this kind of conceptual density without losing the plot, but this band has been running the same story across albums for two decades and somehow keeping it coherent.

3 LP coloured vinyl with etching. 2018 pressing.

Fans of: The Dear Hunter, Periphery, Thrice, My Chemical Romance, The Mars Volta