157. Song No. 2,480: “Devil in Jersey City,” Coheed and Cambria
The Second Stage Turbine Blade, 2002

Well before I knew Co&Ca were churning out a barrage of concept albums both piecing together and complementing one epic sci-fi tale, a friend put this on a mixed CD and rocked my face off with one of the coolest songs that name-drops my state ever.

Then I got to college and found people who LOVED. THE FUCK. out of this band, and Coheed and Cambria became the most unlikely but also steadiest, most reliable musical common ground that I kept being surprised I shared with every new person I meshed well with. By the time Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One was released my junior year, it was damn near a veritable battle of wills to claim the college radio station’s extra copy of the album, which I absolutely still have and regard as one of my greatest collegiate victories. Who needs to participate in sports to feel like a goddamn conquering hero?

Anyway, the wildly tressed and hirsute frontman with a voice like a proggier, burlier Geddy Lee is what makes this band tower miles above anyone else who was inspired by or straight-up ripped off Co&Ca’s sound. The music ranges from fuzzy to crunchy to driving to introspective to balls-to-the-wall rock, and “Devil in Jersey City,” which actually tells the story of how two central characters were attacked by a roving gang called the Jersey City Devils (which any local can tell you is also a delightful nod to our very own homegrown cryptoid, and both my childhood hometown and current residence factor deeply into that mythology for extra thrills), is how I fell in love with it in the first place, completely oblivious to all the deeper storytelling at play.

The thing about concept albums, especially ones with such an otherworldly flavor, is how they do something I absolutely love about fiction, which is making the natural, mundane everyday feel like there’s some magic or greater happening going on under the thin facade of reality we never think to peek behind. And bringing the early chapters of the Amory Wars to a familiar geography was such an unexpected delight: It’s something I’m used to from TV, movies and especially books, but not music. Nothing surreal ever happens in the music I love, and Co&Ca blowing apart my understanding what music could do with a song about a Jersey City brawl was just too much novelty to resist. And it ushered in, like, six solid years of absolutely loving what Shabutie’s next stage of evolution is capable of in all its sprawling, spiraling multimedia-narrative glory.