The Prize Fighter Inferno

Several bands over the course of rock & roll history have worked an ongoing mythology into their records: Jamie Hewlett's elliptical story line told within and between the albums and videos by Gorillaz, for example, or the freaky apocalyptic science fiction plot line, complete with lyrics in a made-up language, that was at the heart of French prog rock outfit Magma. In the midst of their career, however, the neo-prog alt-metal outfit Coheed & Cambria did something quite possibly without precedent: their primary story line, a multi-generational blood feud between three families known as the Amory Wars, grew so complex that one of the band's members started an entirely separate solo project, the Prize Fighter Inferno, to set up part of the story in a different musical style.

The mastermind of the Prize Fighter Inferno is Claudio Sanchez, the lead singer and lyricist of Coheed & Cambria, who also pens an ongoing online graphic novel that fleshes out the primary story line. Sanchez had been working on Prize Fighter material intermittently for almost seven years before releasing any material. Finally issued on Halloween 2006 through Equal Vision, the Prize Fighter Inferno's debut, My Brother's Blood Machine, is a concept album told from the point of view of Inferno (aka Jesse, Coheed's brother), one of the major characters in the Coheed & Cambria mythology, and who died on the band's 2005 album Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness; he tells a self-contained story that both predates the story line of the Amory Wars and sets up part of its plot. Recorded primarily solo by Sanchez, My Brother's Blood Machine is a mostly electronic-based indie rock album, wholly different than Sanchez's usual work.