Coheed and Cambria‘s classic sophomore album In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 turns 20 in October, and to celebrate it’s getting a new vinyl pressing. We have an exclusive 2LP translucent green variant, limited to 1000 copies; grab yours here while they last!
Here’s what we wrote about the album in our list of 30 classic emo and post-hardcore albums turning 20 this year:
Just a year after releasing their instant-classic debut album The Second Stage Turbine Blade, Coheed & Cambria returned with something bigger, better, and bolder in every way. Their sophomore LP In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 found them expertly fusing contemporary post-hardcore and classic progressive rock, and–along with that same year’s De-Loused in the Comatorium by The Mars Volta–this album helped lay the groundwork for a whole crop of bands who would do the same. The album’s first proper song clocks in at over eight minutes and goes on all kinds of musical journeys with all kinds of proggy fretwork, and IKSOSE just goes further down the prog rabbit hole from there. It has a three-song suite (“The Camper Velourium” parts I, II, and III) that gets weirder and weirder as it goes on, and the album ends with two consecutive nine-plus minute songs, one of which marries floating Pink Floyd atmospheres to a classic rock wah solo and one of which channels the zany math-prog of Rush. (It’s also worth noting that Claudio Sanchez’s voice has been compared to Geddy Lee’s for his entire career.) Some parts are more overtly ’70s-inspired than others, but what made Coheed such a force in the early 2000s is that they really took the concept of prog and made it feel new; they didn’t just borrow ideas from the genre’s early days. They also snuck in a few screams borrowed from ’90s screamo, and this album managed to produce two of the most prominent hits of the emo-pop boom (“A Favor House Atlantic” and “Blood Red Summer”). It’s a significant feat that they were able to fit such concise, addictive pop songs on a sprawling prog album; what would Moving Pictures be without “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight”?
Coheed’s Claudio Sanchez is also touring with his solo folktronica project The Prize Fighter Inferno early in 2024. Pick up issues of his My Brother’s Blood Machine comics with exclusive covers in the BV store.
