Tuesday March 9, 2010 New Music

I LOVED Coheed And Cambria's first album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade, but they proceeded to lose me on the two albums that followed, In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3 and Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness. By the time their fourth album, No World For Tomorrow rolled around, I had completely lost interest in them. Last year I caught them performing at the Austin City Limits Festival and found my interest in them rekindled. I had forgotten what a stellar live band they are and have been meaning to revisit their albums ever since. I finally got around to listening Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One again yesterday and really got into it. So today when I got my weekly email newsletter from Amie St., I was psyched to see that they are offering a download of Coheed's new single "The Broken" from their upcoming album Year Of The Black Rainbow for free. I'm not sure if this is an edited version and if a longer, different version will appear on the full length, but this is a great 4 minutes of prog hard rock. As Coheed tends to be more of an album oriented band as opposed to a singles band, this shows promise for the rest of the record being pretty solid. We shall see come April 13th when it is released.

Dark Tranquillity are considered O.G.'s in the Swedish melodic death metal scene. I have two of their albums, Damage Done and Character and like them, but don't listen to them a ton. They are definitely one of those bands that I've always meant to spend more time listening to, see live, etc., but unfortunately simply haven't gotten around to it yet. Since they are considered fairly consistent in their output, there is a good amount of excitement surrounding the release of their new album We Are The Void. Personally, I'm more apt to first check out their 1995 album The Gallery which was recently inducted into the Decibel Hall Of Fame, but will hopefully get around to hearing both in the near future.



Just kidding.



I saw Titus Andronicus open for Los Campesinos! about a year ago and thought they weren't too shabby. The singer seemed like he was trying a bit too hard to be something or other, but the music was still fairly interesting. A friend of mine sent me a copy of their new album, The Monitor weeks ago and I haven't gotten around to listening to it yet, so if it you get it and it sucks, then don't blame me as I'm not officially endorsing it, but simply expressing some slight interest in hearing it.



I wrote about White Wizzard's Over The Top last month when it was only available on iTunes, but now it is available everywhere. If you love Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Dio, etc., etc., then this will probably be right up your alley.