In Retrospect: Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV – Coheed & Cambria’s Monolith Third Album

Honestly, I miss the way we used to discover music. I came across an insane amount of my favourite bands in the early 00’s from CD samplers, guitar magazine features and liner notes. I was that guy who would scour through the ‘Thank You’ section of a CD booklet and buy an album simply if a band I liked was thanking them in the liner notes.

I got my hands on an Equal Vision Records CD sampler in 2004 that introduced me to two of my all-time favourite bands, Alexisonfire and Coheed & Cambria. The sampler featured ‘The Crowing’ and ‘A Favor House Atlantic’ and started a nerdy love affair with a band that I have spent the last 20 years obsessing over. I caught the bus into Christchurch City the following week to pay a dumb amount of money for a copy of In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth:3 and wore that thing to death. A few months later, I was reading an issue of Guitar World Magazine and saw that the band had announced their forthcoming third album, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness. That title alone made my nerdy spider sense tingle in the best possible way.

20 years later and I’m sitting in my studio in Melbourne. Coheed are set to finally return to Australian shores in November to headline Monolith Festival and it’s going to be one hell of a special run as they’ll be playing Good Apollo 1 in its entirety to celebrate the 20^th anniversary. With this very special tour approaching rapidly, I’ve been tooled with the task of writing about this monolith of a record (you’re welcome) and why it absolutely changed the game for the band and their fans.

Alright, back to the Guitar World article. I remember the headline said something along the lines of ‘Did Coheed & Cambria Write The Best Riff Of 2005?’ in reference to ‘Welcome Home’. Little did the writer know that they had written a riff that would define an entire generation of guitar players. To this day, my Instagram feed is constantly flooded with players around the world trying valiantly to pull their gnarliest pinch harmonics playing that riff and I’m pretty sure it was everyone’s Guitar Hero song of choice for well over a decade. That song took a seemingly underground nerdy progressive rock band and shot them to great heights in no time. It’s easy to understand why that song is their staple encore and their most streamed song by a longshot. It’s epic, harrowing and infectious, but honestly, that only scratches the surface of how brilliant this album is.

Let’s start from the top then. The opening duo of ‘Keeping The Blade’ and ‘Always & Never’ ease you into the album nicely before ‘Welcome Home’ and ‘Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood & Burial)’ hit you square in the face. It made absolute sense for those two songs to be lead singles for the album as they serve as perfect introduction songs for anyone who hadn’t heard the band before. Once you’ve heard the ‘Ten Speed’ chorus, it’s fucking impossible to get out of your head for days.

‘Crossing The Frame’ is one of my favourite Coheed deep cuts and I’m crazy excited to finally see it live. Both ‘The Writing Writer’ and ‘Once Upon Your Dead Body’ are packed full of nasty grooves and feature some of the coolest bass work on the album. ‘Wake Up’ is obviously a beautifully moving tearjerker that works as a perfect palette cleanser before jumping into the bombastic catchiness of ‘The Suffering’, a song that is bound to get your hips swaying and hands clapping.

Sure, this album has some amazing hits and staples from the band's catalogue, but the deep cuts hit just as hard on this one. ‘The Lying Lies & Dirty Secrets of Miss Erica Court’ and ‘Mother May I’ are both great tracks - and they’ve hardly ever been played in a live setting. One of the coolest things about Coheed making their Neverender album plays a fairly regular thing to celebrate milestone anniversaries is that these deep cuts finally have a chance to shine in the live show.

Coheed have a long track record of epicness, but the four-act closing piece of Good Apollo 1 has to be one of the most ambitious and incredible pieces in their discography. Each 7-minute song in the finale delivers something different and thrilling, but ‘The Final Cut’ is just the ultimate all-time jam to close out an album. Between Claudio Sanchez's soaring vocal delivery, the haunting organ that guides the track and the perfectly crafted guitar solos that take the album out, it’s one of those magical listens that gets better every time you hear it.

The album clocks in at just over an hour and ten minutes long, but it never ceases to be a riveting and enthralling listen. The performances are amazing, the production is enormous, there are a tonne of Easter Eggs to keep the listener on their toes and it just flows superbly from start to finish.

There were Coheed albums before this one and many after it, but it’s clear that Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV: From Fear Through The Eyes of Madness was an enormous turning point in their career and laid an amazing foundation for the band to grow in so many ways. 20 years on and the Coheed-verse has grown to whole new depths and the band is still releasing exceptional music. They have cultivated one of the most passionate fanbases in modern music and it’s honestly just great to see the band still thriving and doing the thing they love the most.

The Monolith tour is going to be a really special one for a number of reasons, but let’s talk about that closer to the time.

Words by Nicholas Simonsen @blackechomusic

Monolith is creeping up....

Monolith 2024

November 2 @ Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane

November 9 @ PICA, Melbourne

November 11 @ Hordern Pavilion, Sydney

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