It has often been said that change is inevitable in all things including music, but the first half of Coheed And Cambria's Afterman concept album proves that not all change is good. Now shockingly far from the mathy metal powerhouse that the band was when they released In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth (and now really only a shadow of the group who released Year Of The Black Rainbow too – and that was only in 2010), Coheed And Cambria seem content to create a lengthy and stylistically frustrating concept album which features metal that is more glammy than mathy and lighter overall than anything they've ever done previously. Some critics will say they could see this coming after Black Rainbow seemed more interested in fashion than rock, but that's just a statement of convenience; the only other metal this light is aluminum.
It goes without saying that any possible commentary afforded on Ascension would be far from glowing, but happily the band makes it pretty hard for any self-respecting metalhead to actually like what they've made; throughout songs like “Key Entity Extraction I,” “Mothers Of Man” and “Goodnight Fair Lady” )to say nothing of the other parts of “Key Entity Extraction,” but more on that later), guitarist Travis Stever seems intent on feminizing CandC's sound and blacking it to the point where it's virtually unrecognizable as the same band who wrote and recorded “Everything Evil” and “Hearshot Kid Disaster.” Longtime fans will likely recoil at that sentiment but, if they have to find out the hard way, they'll likely end up recoiling even further when they find the state Claudio Sanchez is in here. Here, Sanchez attempts to wring as much glitter as he possibly can into his performance, to absolutely no positive effect at all. Listening to the combination of the lighter guitars and glammier vocals is not unlike listening to the worst Billy Talent record ever made – but the fact that “Key Entity Extraction” features three more installments after the first just makes it flat-out boring too. Eventually, those who start listening to this record will find themselves hanging on, but are really just waiting for it to end so they can say they made it all the way through. Such criticism wouldn't be a wonderful thing to hear about any album, but it's even worse in the case of this installment of Ascension because, as the record ends, fans will come to the grim realization that they'll be subjected to the second half of this production later this year. We can only hope that, if it's going to be poor, it isn't half as bad as this.
Artist:
www.coheedandcambria.com/
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Album:
The Afterman: Ascension is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
