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Rating: How do you make good music appreciated by someone who listens to trash? Simple, just let them listen to "Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star: Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness" by the versatile Coheed and Cambria.
The New York quartet has fully demonstrated their capabilities with their third album. The album opens with the classic epic instrumental piece this time titled "Keeping the Blade" which acts as a perfect prelude to what follows; from the second track onward, Coheed, led by the charismatic Claudio Sanchez, showcase their skills starting from tracks 2 and 3 (respectively "Always & Never Clean" and "Welcome Home"), in which there are clear 'Pink Floydian' influences for the second track and 'Pumpkian' (as regards the opening of the third track) and 'Led Zeppelin-like' (listen to the solo of "Welcome Home"). Certainly, the old punk-rock melodies that characterized their previous albums are not missing; in fact, both "Ten Speed (for God's Blood & Burial)" and, especially, "The Suffering", reprise the classic melodies already heard in tracks like "A Flavor House to the Atlantic".
The album certainly doesn't lack classic rock influences, as in "The Lying Lies & the Dirty Secret of Erica Court", and indie influences that appear sporadically in almost every track. A separate chapter should be dedicated to two tracks: the first one is "Wake Up", an acoustic track which, in my opinion, is the best track on the album, the second is "The Willing Well IV: the Final Cut", a track contained in the sub-album "The Willing Well" (four tracks each about 7 minutes long where the band gives their best with continuous stylistic changes within the same tracks) which almost represents the fusion of their roots with their classic style: a blues piece enriched with heavy electric guitars, rich effects, and powerful guitar solos.
The album was very well thought out over two dualisms: the first is between Sanchez and Stever where the guitars constantly exchange roles between lead and rhythm; the second is between Eppard and Todd, with the former surprising by inserting passages in odd time signatures and the latter not only filling empty spaces but changing picking techniques almost in every track (listen to "The Suffering" to understand): in short, a true masterpiece.
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