Like the Mars Volta, progressive-metal suite freaks Coheed and Cambria are almost too smart and ambitious for their own good –not enough, however, to cancel out the instrumental highs and car-radio-chorus charge of the best songs on their fourth album. No World for Tomorrow is reportedly the concluding episode in a tortuous, apocalyptic libretto by singer-guitarist Claudio Sanchez that connects all of the band’s records. (Coheed and Cambria are named after the lead characters.) But there is more immediate, impressive resolution in the decisive pop arc of the mutating riffs and slippery time signatures Sanchez bundles into “The Hound (of Blood and Rank)” and “The Running Free.” His classic-rock aspirations are all over the razor-guitar hum of “Feathers” (note the shards of Uriah Heep’s 1972 hit single “Easy Livin’ ” rattling around inside) and the harmonized Thin Lizzy-style luster of the guitars and Sanchez’s vocals, like a choir of Geddy Lees, in “Justice in Murder.” Sanchez’s rabbit-hole saga may be over –the album finishes with a five-part, twenty-five-minute exclamation point, “The End Complete” –but there is plenty here that is worthy of rewind.
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