Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow

I’m a ’heed head. Not in a pit-frenzied way, but in a misty-eyed sentimentality for heavy metal kind of way. Coheed and Cambria remind me of great ’70s and ’80s bands like Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Rush and Iron Maiden … OK, even some Triumph. The band’s latest album follows and concludes the thematic fictional world created by the band’s leader Claudio Sanchez on 2005’s Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. If No World for Tomorrow came out 20 years ago, it would have surly been in every headbanger’s collection. Coheed and Cambria songs reveal multiple layers of intertwined metallic rock-opera melodies and pounding drums courtesy of the Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins, who filled in after Josh Eppard left. Songs like “The Running Free,” “Feathers,” “The Hound,” and the title track … hell, nothing on the album disappoints musically, and each song delivers steering-wheel thumping metallic rock. No World for Tomorrow just might make Coheed and Cambria huge. Perhaps the music industry’s metronome peg is swinging back toward conceptual hard rock.