A slow, lonely guitar riff slowly builds in intensity before giving way rather inevitably to a disjointed verse in the opening of the album’s second track. And then the chorus hits; ‘Turn about face I implore you! Brother!’ shouts frontman Claudio Sanchez, each word accompanied by a mighty thunderclap of drums. It’s at this point that you might realise Coheed and Cambria are a pretty good rock band, but it isn’t until a little later that it becomes obvious that the band is something special.
Around half way into this eight-minute single ‘Key Entity Extraction I: Domino the Destitute’, standard verses and choruses take a leave of absence. In their place is a winding, intricate section in which musicianship comes to the fore. Twin guitars alternately howl and serenade, mammoth drum beats trample into the foreground, and Sanchez’s implausibly vast vocal range concentrates each element into a tremendously satisfying cacophony. Something special indeed.
The Afterman: Ascension is part one of a double album by the progressive-alternative rockers Coheed and Cambria. The album sees a return to the stylistic cues of the band’s earlier work; the electronic fuzz of their previous effort, Year of the Black Rainbow, has been abandoned in favour of the guitar-driven approach that characterised their early releases. Highlights of the album are the moments of the unexpected. Few bands imagine what it would be like if a crowded bar suddenly launched into a rock-infused musical number, but Coheed and Cambria aims to do just that with the amusingly bouncy tempo and occasional piano-inflected phrases of ‘Goodnight, Fair Lady’.
Given that the unexpectedly experimental portions of The Afterman: Ascension are its finest, it is perhaps fitting that the album’s weakest moment is its most ordinary song. Despite some outstanding interplay between drums and bass guitar in its chorus, ‘Key Entity Extraction IV: Evagria The Faithful’ fails to excite in the same way as the songs it sits between.
The album’s most touching moment is in its final track. ‘Subtraction’ is a minimalist, electronica-infused acoustic song which acts as a fine counterpoint to the album’s more boisterous sections. ‘Subtract me from your heart’ Sanchez softly implores the listener in what is probably the most tender tune Coheed and Cambria have ever released. What strikes me most about The Afterman: Ascension is the sheer amount of emotion expressed. There’s an enormous exuberance here, complemented by a numbing sadness. These vastly disparate sensations come together to form what in my opinion is Coheed and Cambria’s best album to date.