Top Ten Coheed and Cambria Songs

Coheed and Cambria is one of those rare bands. Not everyday do you hear rock ballads composed solely to create a tail about Irobots killing their children and destroying the entire keywork of their solar system. Coheed and Cambria is this band though. Here are there top ten songs:

10. Devil in Jersey City
We start off the list with Devil in Jersey City. To give a background on this song, we have one character (Patrick) taking his girlfriend (Josephine) to a shady part of the city to consumate a proposal. The cause and effect of thsi being that the "corner boys" beat Patrick and rape Josephine. This song is edgy with a garage-band sound that created Coheed and Cambria as the band they are now. Devil in Jersey City is quick moving with guitar bouncing from every direction immaginable. But, obviously since it is in 10th place, it is not the best of their songs.

9. Blood Red Summer
Blood Red Summer isn't the song that made Coheed and Cambria famous, but it was the best song that put them on the road to stardome. "A Favor House Atlantic" was the first song by Coheed to be majorly produced. It was featured on MTV and featured in dance routines across most high schools in America, but this was not the number 9 song they ever made, possibly the 90th. Blood Red Summer is the award winning, mass-produced song off of In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. Blood Red Summer is the type of song one might hear at an emo pep-ralley. With lyrics such as "what did I do to deserve" along with stacatto guitar licks and the peppy mantra "hey, hey, hey hey hey," this is sure to be a crowd pleaser for anyone celebrating about the fact that they life sucks.

8. Everything Evil
Everything Evil sounds as scary as it... sounds. The song begins with a quick, yet sporadic, bass pedal that sends the listener through a creaking door and is greated by the bullet of four notes from the guitar. The harsh instrumentals combined with the whispering of Claudio Sanchez's voice creates an ominous juxtaposition that builds up throughout the song. This is one of the better produced songs off of their Second Stage Turbine Blade album and is number eight with its ability to seamlessly tie together two juxtaposed sounds.

7. 33
33 Brings the listener back to the character Patrick and his struggles with a dead fiance as well as his life on the line as well. Considering the subject matter, this is a high intensity song with a gorgeous guitar that flows throughout the whole song causing the listener to get lost in river of sound. If any Coheed and Cambria song could be a dance song, this would be it. 33 is a song that seems as if it would have no end, but ironically enough it simply ends.

6. Al the Killer
Al the Killer is a song that represents exactly what it sounds like. Al plays off the idea that he is an "Artificial Intelligence" and the ambiguity between L and I has always made Coheed fans wonder if the AI's name is actually AL. It has been confirmed that AL is his name. The background of this segment is about Al who captains the Velorium Camper and is racist against white girls. The song in itself seems very schizophrenic. It's ADD, compulsive and it seems delusional at times. The song constantly interrupts itself with its own complexities while Al shows his compulsivity with the chorus "die white girls, die white girls." He shows how delusional he is by the power he has in controlling a massive ship as a killing machine. The song is pitchy, decadent and dissonant all at the same time, but it works together to create a great song.

5. Keeping the Blade
The one thing any Coheed and Cambria fan likes about the band is their parallelism. It is the trade off from different songs that one finds interconnected in other Coheed songs. Keeping the Blade is the epitome of this parallelism. The parallel found in this song comes from "Second Stage Turbine Blade," "God Send Conspirator" and "The Ring in Return." Keeping the Blade has to be the best version of this song. It's a delicate song played by a group of strings and it was a great way to kick off their album "Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness."

4. Time Consumer
Time Consumer is off of Coheed and Cambria's first album "Second Stage Turbine Blade." It is the second song after another song that parallels Keeping the Blade where it filters out and segues into Time Consumer with a steady bass pumping out triplets. Soon after that the guitar interrupts and the softly harsh voice of Claudio sings a heavy metal lullaby. One of the better lines of this song- and I'm not a violent person- is "librarian find me the pole, the one that kicks your head in." It has angst, yet it his a quietude to it, and its that paradox that is pivotal in all great Coheed songs.

3. The Crowing
The Crowing, in context of the story, deals with Claudio (the character) and his struggle with being a super-being. The Crowing is something of a Messiah and is supposed to reunite the keywork. The song begins with the sharp strike of a piano chord with incoherent, barroom singing, a pitter-patter through a back alley and the sound of harsh screaming. The opening guitar part begins with a steady, bullet-like strumming and a crecendo into Claudio's high-pitched vocals again. It starts off slower than usual songs, but it unfolds into another epic rock piece that even vows the imminent protection of Ambelina over Claudio "dear Ambelina, the Prise, I choose you to watch over me." After this line the song picks up and begins to rock creating, yet again, another paradox. This is a song that is in the number on spot of many Coheed lovers' lists. For me, it's going to be three.

2. Welcome Home
Upon hearing this song, one would be certain in saying that its proper name is Welcome Home. This was the song that turned Coheed and Cambria into a franchise, and its epic capability did such a thing rightfully so. Claudio decided to dust off his double-necked guitar for this song with one of the most wicked solos to ever hit the ears of any creature with hearing capability. The timeliness of each note is pristine along with some of the highest singing I have ever heard from Claudio. This all builds up into another convention used by Coheed (and a convention that makes every song in which they use it grandiose), the building cult-like chant. The open mouthed gape of what sounds to be either a 500 man choir, or a 500 group of drunk frat boys starts making this chant, and it is the perfect denoument for this song.

1. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3
In Keeping Secrets is a song that should be paired with the song before it, "The Ring in Return." In The Ring in Return, we hear a phone ring, along with walking, a girl saying hello and the parallel we hear in "Keeping the Blade." After a few minutes of this, a space ship is heard, then a man says "Hello, Apollo, where should I begin?" Then the song leaks into "In Keeping Secrets" and at that point the listener knows that Apollo is going to hear it right then and there, en media res, during an epic battle. Although In Keeping Secrets is not the best Coheed song in terms if technicality, it is the best composed song by the group. It has the perfect use of mods and distortions along with renergetic lyrics such as, "man your own jackhammers/ man your battle stations/ we'll have you dead pretty soon." The song ultimately ends with another cult-like chant, but one even more epic than Welcome Home, and leaves the listener in apprehension of the rest of the album.

Coheed and Cambira can be defined as a Progressive Rock band. They started with an idea and this idea has expanded to become something much more than they have expected. These top ten songs only scratch the surface, but there is still more to hear.