Coheed and Cambria - "Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe"

A slow start, but a worthwhile listen

I’m still a new Coheed and Cambria fan. My first experience with the group was with their last album, 2022’s Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind.¹ I’ve since explored a bit of their back catalogue, and even signed onto the No World for Tomorrow 20th Anniversary BackerKit in order to get my foot in the door with actually understanding the story.

I’m still waiting on that, though.

But the important thing here, for those of you unfamiliar with Coheed, is that there is a story. Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe is the group’s 11th studio album, and only one of those albums (2015’s The Color Before the Sun) did not relate to the story that the band is telling, which is known as The Amory Wars.

Founding member and frontman Claudio Sanchez took a trip to Paris in 1998, right after his split from Beautiful Loser, and started writing to kill time. Sanchez was already a member of the group that would become Coheed, back when the band was still known as ‘Shabütie’. Seemingly, during the writing of the band’s third EP, Delirium, those stories were used to inspire a couple of songs, and it stuck. The Amory Wars became a foundational concept for the band’s work moving forward; the band even renamed themselves after two of the story’s protagonists: ‘Coheed’ and ‘Cambria’.

Sanchez would go on to partner with comic writer Chondra Echert, artist Rags Morales, colorist Emilio Lopez, and editor Blaze James to produce The Amory Wars in comic form, along with a couple of other series; Sanchez and Echert married in 2009. The comic allows Sanchez to delve deeper into the story’s lore, providing context for the band’s music and lyrics, as the story is not inherently comprehensible by listening to the albums, alone.

Believe me — I’ve tried.

But as much as Coheed’s music leans into this vast sci-fi narrative, it remains grounded in the here and now, an extension of Sanchez’s emotions and experiences. As he told Rocksound in an interview:

“I just wanted to write what I was feeling. The record really told me what it was. I think about all the things that I had gone through, the loss that I had experienced over the time of writing the record, and the questions it posed. It was not something that I was completely thinking about when writing the record, but in looking back at the material that I chose, that was the story that wanted to be told.”

[ . . . ]

“This time around, I didn’t really think about the concept when I was writing the music. It was really about who I was at the time, the questions I was asking myself. It was really more therapy. Constructing the concept came later, finding those qualities in the songs that made for good storytelling. You could listen to this record and never care about the story component, because there’s really nothing that literally connects it.”

All of that — the emotions and therapy and self-exploration — is distilled into one of the oddest album openers I’ve ever heard: “Yesterday’s Lost”. It’s a soft piano open, swelling into strings before fading into guitar and synth and Sanchez’s mournful vocals. It’s clearly a song with death, loss, and, more than anything, love right at its heart; the song is largely the result of Sanchez processing his grief after the death of his uncle.

Most album openers aim to make a splash, but “Yesterday’s Lost” really exists to make a statement:

“I don’t want you to go” is the song’s last line. The song sets up a thematic sense of loss and the concept of moving on, then rolls on into “Goodbye, Sunshine”, which acts more like a traditional opener, with driving and addicting energy that leaves a serious impression.

Coheed’s knack for writing songs with strong, unique hooks is on full display throughout the album. This ability means that all of Coheed’s albums have something of a unique identity, but also carries the risk that the band’s core sound is occasionally buried (or misunderstood). If you’re familiar with a Coheed album already, applying that album as an expectation for this one is only going to result in confusion and, probably, disappointment.

With as much as I loved A Window of the Waking Mind, my first listen of The Father of Make Believe felt something like a disappointment. The downer intro certainly didn’t help, but then few of the tracks that followed channeled the same vibe very well. The Father of Make Believe lingers more firmly in Prog and Alt-Rock territory, with fewer Prog Metal touches throughout and more genric experimentation.

The album’s first single, for example, was “Blind Side Sonny”, which is very much a Punk track with some metallic flavor added. It’s also the first song in the first of two suites on the album, as it runs directly into “Play the Poet”. The Punk influences there make the two songs, combined, total less than six minutes.

Then “Corner My Confidence” is a downbeat psuedo-folk track, and “Someone Who Can” brings 80s New/Synthwave vibes to the party, blending them really well with an Alt Rock base. Most specifically, it feels strongly reminiscent of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”² with a touch of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ‘69” — I think maybe they were going for an 80s summer anthem here.

The album’s last four songs are part of a suite called “The Continuum”. This suite, like the closing suite on A Window of the Waking Mind, is where most of the album’s Metal elements come to the fore. This suite comes with the mild disappointment that the four songs act more like separate tracks than parts of a whole, but they’re all good.

I do want to note that the final track, album closer “The Continuum IV: So It Goes”, draws very blatant, intentional inspiration from ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” with its boppy key and rhythm line. It provides an exceptionally optimistic close to the album, a sharp contrast to the grief that The Father of Make Believe opens with.

That said, I still don’t love “Yesterday’s Lost”, especially as the opener. I’m also not a huge fan of the Punk suite, though I enjoy the “Play the Poet” half. Those two songs aside, this album is full of songs which have already grown on me quite a lot. I still don’t think this album is as strong as its predecessor, but it also isn’t as weak as my initial opinion suggested.

I’ll definitely be playing this one quite a bit over the coming months.

Rating: Blue

1. Vaxis II was one of my favorite albums of 2022, ranking 5th in my end-of-year countdown. There was something undeniable about the album; I initially rated it lower, but it just continued to improve with every listen. Even now, three years later, nothing about that album feels stale; it’s still an exciting and enthralling experience.

2. Reddit in the search results is always a good sign. I would have sat on this review for another week, easy, trying to place this song; I’m a writer who frequently forgets words and a music guy who usually can’t find a title or melody on demand.

I blame the ADHD.