Remember my discography review for this band from a while back? This will be the final review for that at least for a while. Yes, it is finally over now that this album has been released on July 7th. Anyway, this is a band that has made a name for themselves since their breakthrough second album The Silent Circus and has since been progressing their sound and have created very intricate stories like the one from Parallax I and II.
Coma Ecliptic follows another rather interesting story to try and follow. The thing that makes this more interesting story would be that it's in a rock opera form, similar to that of The Who's Tomy album. What this means is less harsh vocals, more melody and easier lyrics to decipher. The story here is about a man who falls into a coma for who knows how long has many visions during this and eventually wakes up at the end. I know he woke up because in the last track it states he smells fresh air and for the remainder of the track he begins to explore the world around him to see if anything has changed. Maybe it's not as original as the Parallax but it's still interesting just trust me. Unlike the previous few albums, the tracks almost refuse to bleed into each other which you could say is similar to Seventh Son by Iron Maiden or something like The Black Halo by Kamelot, at least in the transition and instrumental sense. Though tracks like The Coma Machine, which is where our character is in comatose, Memory Palace, the epic, and Node, our introduction, are great contributors to the story and can provide the most amount of information. The tracks in this album seem to basically return to start by not having epics that span for any longer than 10 minutes which is kind of a let down to me but then again, there are some albums I like as much as this that don't have any epics so it seem more like I'm nitpicking than anything. The songwriting, as usual, as phenomenal. Even with the much shorter tracks, they can still portray enough of a storyline in one track to do some justice and there isn't any filler to this story whatsoever. The cleaner vocals Tommy provides makes it better to understand what's going on and the raw sound of the cleans fit well with the atmosphere they give us. It's not the best album, that still remains to be Colors by a longshot, but regardless, this is still something that is absolutely beautiful sounding and admittedly heartbreaking sometimes the further you dog deeper in.
Another masterpiece for sure. This concludes the Between the Buried and Me discography until the next release. I give this a 9.5/10. I am the Grim Reaper, signing off.