I’d recommend reading this along with listening to the album, following it song by song. Bear in mind this is simply my interpretation.
Recently I’ve written story walkthroughs of Between the Buried and Me’s albums Automata and Parallax, and since there’s only one BTBAM concept album left to write about, I thought I’d tackle it. Here’s the band’s rock opera – Coma Ecliptic.
Node
Our protagonist sees no point in living. His home planet is coming to an end, and he feels completely alone. Everything he sees is empty. He wants to find an escape from this depression.
The Coma Machine
Our protagonist finds a way to escape his current life – a machine that allows him to enter a comatose state and relive periods of past lives. He has thoughts of hanging himself. This would be the ultimate escape, after all. However, he decides to use this coma machine to search his past lives for a better place to live out the rest of his days.
The machine overwhelms his senses, his mind filled with stimuli. The machine flushes his brain with a new world – one of these past lives. The protagonist is too afraid to open his eyes once the bombardment stops, and has a vision of his own death. Not merely a thought, but a true sight into how this will happen. His knees crash down onto the ground, and he exhales his last breath.
Dim Ignition
The new world our protagonist finds himself in is dark in nature. He sees the inhabitants of this world, and they are enslaved. Murder is common when a citizen disobeys. In the distance our protagonist sees a figure clad in ancient garb, his gaze striking like lightning bolts. The protagonist approaches the mysterious figure and tries to convince him to free the dwellers of the world. Before the protagonist can help any of the inhabitants, he is taken away from this world and reverses back to the machine.
Famine Wolf
Our protagonist finds himself in a new world, again sinister in nature. In this world there is a werewolf-like creature named The Famine Wolf. This creature devours humans in order to sustain itself.
The protagonist finds himself amongst the last surviving humans in this world. They question whether they will be enough to make sure humanity survives.
The protagonist finally sees The Famine Wolf, and its eating a human being. This is almost too much for him to process, seeing flesh move over bone. He questions how he ever lived in this reality in the first place, and confirms with himself that this isn’t the world in which he wishes to spend the rest of his life. He returns to the coma machine.
King Redeem/Queen Serene
The next world our protagonist finds himself in unsettles him. It’s a world where humans have adapted to live in the sea. This means that the protagonist’s body is in the form of one of these adapted humans. He can’t hear or see anything due to an altered colour spectrum and deformed ears.
Slowly our protagonist grows accustomed to his new body, and can hear and see once more. He is still, however, unsettled at how deformed the human race has become in this underwater world. Even though this is a much different reality to what the protagonist is used to, he finds evidence that this civilisation as a language. Manuscripts scattered over the sea floor, and complex structures built by inhabitants, prove that this is an intelligent species. This is not, however, enough for our protagonist to stay – the deformity of life here is too much for him to cope with, and he couldn’t live this way. He once again makes his way back to the machine.
Turn on the Darkness
This new world our protagonist finds himself in is one completely shrouded in darkness. This strikes fear in him. In the distance he sees a strong flame. The protagonist approaches the flame and sees a figure holding a torch. This man is Prospect 2 from the band’s previous story Parallax. The man questions why the protagonist is here, explaining that it’s a world for people who have lost their home world and have no place else to go. The protagonist wishes to follow the man and his flame and show him more of this world. The man leads him to The Torchbearer, a being seemingly possessing of higher power. The Torchbearer asks our protagonist to follow him. He reassures the protagonist that life does exist outside of this world. Modern life has he knows it is still out there somewhere. There’s an opportunity to escape the coma.
The Ectopic Stroll
A doctor is sat beside our comatose protagonist, and tells him that he’s there for him. Our protagonist hears the doctor inside his coma and after learning that there is a way to escape, begs the doctor for help in doing this. He’s not found a world that he feels he could live in, and he wants out. He’s afraid he might die inside the coma machine.
The doctor seems odd, maybe even untrustworthy, but the protagonist has no option but to trust him.
Rapid Calm
All of a sudden the protagonist finds himself in an all-white room with two levers on the wall in front of him – one golden and one velvet. He can choose here whether to continue his journey and travel to another new world, or exit the coma. Our protagonist realises now that although his life is full of pain, everything happens for a reason. Does he continue his search, or does he end his journey here?
Memory Palace
Our protagonist knows that none of the worlds he’s been to inside the coma machine want him there, and so he decides to pull the velvet lever and leave the coma. After pulling the lever, the chatter in his mind leaves him and he smells the real world once more. He sees that he’s inside the coma room, with the machine next to him. He’s feels free.
However, after a while, he starts to notice recurring themes from in his coma in the real world. Slowly he starts to realise that this isn’t the return to reality he thought it was. Everything he’s experienced, every new world he’s been to, has been a dream within his coma. None of it was real. He feels as though this nightmare will never end.
Option Oblivion
The scenery around him transforms back into the white room he was in previously. Again, he’s provided with a choice – a golden lever to continue exploring new worlds, and a velvet lever to wake from his coma. The protagonist once again chooses to escape. He looks back at the journey he’s taken, and pulls the velvet lever. He gasps a breath of fresh air and looks around at a world he doesn’t recognise. This is his home.
Life in Velvet
Our protagonist feels pure euphoria as his senses awaken. He can smell the living. He can feel his limbs once more, and lifts them in wonder. Through all of this, however, he now knows that everything he’s experienced his entire life has been false – all dreams inside a coma. With this realisation, in this state of happiness mixed with confusion and darkness, our protagonist exhales his last breath.
–
I love this album because it’s kind of like Between the Buried and Me’s anthology series, where each song is a different story until they all link together at the end. I especially love the touch where Prospect 2 from Parallax turns up in Turn on the Darkness. Anyway, there it is – the end of my write-ups of BTBAMs albums. For now at least.
– Kane
Prog Breakdown 