The Broken - (2010)
Music Video/Single by Coheed and Cambria
The very first track off of Year of the Black Rainbow. It was the first taste of new material sense the quite distasteful No World For Tomorrow, and it certainly left more questions than answers. The song on its own is better than the majority of No World For Tomorrow, which is a plus, but it isn’t quite at the level of Apollo part 1. The song has single power. A singalong chorus with some interesting lyrics and story context, the beginnings of Wilhelm Ryan’s defiance against the mages of the keywork. It just doesn’t hit that threshold of quality that was on Good Apollo 1 or Keeping Secrets. I think what bothered me the most was the reservation of Claudio’s vocals. If you are trying to tout this as your best material, which I believe they did in an interview, you need to show off what you can do. There is a lot of restraint on this song, and it does not work. This type of restraint has been executed much better, in fact much better with tracks like Guns of Summer from the same album. Overall the song has its moments but ultimately falls just short of the mark of excellence I was hoping from this track.
The video however is very cool. Animated in a neat style that feels very comic bookish. It details the attack of Wilhelm Ryan on the forces of the mages. This is his attempt at accessing the power of the keywork. This is the closest I can get to official stuff. I have to do more research into the full story arch of the black rainbow in order to get a sense for which battle this is representing. The video drew me in very quickly and mixed well with the song. The animation style is very entrancing the way the action is portrayed. Like I said earlier, very comic bookish. Overall I find the video to be an excellent visual representation of both the story and the music.
Even if the music isn’t the best it could be, it is far from bad and thus the song gets a meh (Not a dislike) and the video gets a like.
Listen to it yourself and give me your opinions. Like it? Dislike it? Why?