How do you stay fresh and vital more than 20 years into a career? The answer, for Claudio Sanchez, was found in revitalizing Coheed And Cambria's sound with an open mind and the help of a producer better known for pop punk than prog rock.
"I didn’t want-something that was obvious, "says Claudio Sancho about Coheed-And Cambria’s latest album, Vaxis II: A Window Of The Waking Mind. The impetus behind Sanchez’s yearning for a fresh perspective was the simple fact that Coheed’s current release arrives as the group celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade. Their new record marks two decades of storytelling inside the science fiction universe that Sanchez created with The Amory Wars concept, an epic adventure spanning nine albums and counting, alongside comic books and novels.
The current story arc is a pentalogy that began with 2018’s Vaxis I: Unheavenly Creatures and with Vaxis II Sanchez was aware that the sheer scale of The Amory Wars could intimidate newbies.
It was Minardi who suggested producer Zakk Cervini, far from an obvious choice whose work includes pop punks Blink 182 and Good Charlotte, as well as Aussie pop rockers 5 Seconds Of Summer. “Twenty years into my career. I’m open;” says Sanchez about the unlikely partnership. Sanchez wrote the music at home in New York, sending out demos to his bandmates. Guitarist Travis Stever and bassist Zach Cooper recorded their contributions remotely, while Sanchez and drummer Josh Eppard went to Los Angeles for drum tracks, plus some additional vocals.
His biggest concern was capturing the emotions in the delivery of his vocals, and much of his singing on the album comes from his home demos.
The band produced Vaxis I themselves, but Cervini helped expand their sound on the follow-up. It’s not just that Cervini’s presence put a twist on Coheed’s musical identity — which he certainly does with processed vocals, unfamiliar guitar tones, and even hints of disco in some of Josh Eppard’s drumming — but the producer helped Sanchez select the material that made it onto the album.
As much as Coheed trade in space opera and sci-fi, the music is grounded in emotion and real experiences, with Sanchez employing the story as a vehicle for expressing feelings and ideas that he might not feel comfortable articulating otherwise
As someone who never set out to be the voice and face of a band, Sanchez has been taken by surprise by the way the singing itself has become the most enjoyable part of the whole enterprise.
The songwriting on Vaxis II steers away from long-form compositions, yet given that the album is the second entry in a five-album cycle within the wider Amory Wars saga, Coheed clearly aren’t abandoning their progressive instincts anytime soon.
During the interim between the first and second Vaxis albums, Coheed And Cambria released the single Jessie's Girl 2, their sequel to Rick Springfield’s 1981 hit about unrequited love. It all started quite by accident when the band decided to get together and jam pre-pandemic. They put down a few ideas before they started playing around with the riff that became Jessie's Girl 2. “For some reason I just started singing, Jessie's Girl,’ and we started joking: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if at one point in our career we did a record of songs that are sequels to other band’s songs?’ I took the session home, I wrote the song to it, we just put it on the shelf and then the pandemic happened. We thought maybe we can bring this idea out just for fun. Management hit up Rick Springfield to let him know and see if he’d be interested in a cameo or singing a portion of it, and he was totally game.
As for The Amory Wars, the story has at least three albums left to go, having expanded beyond far beyond his first formative inklings.
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