Looking back, it makes no sense that Coheed and Cambria was ever lumped in with the early 2000s emo/post-hardcore/pop-punk scene.  Sure, they were members of the Equal Vision Records roster and shared a number of tours with scene mainstays like Thursday, The Used, and Further Seems Forever. They were even a fixture of Warped Tour for several years.

But musically, they have far more in common with bands like Rush and Led Zeppelin (to whom Coheed was compared by Guitar World on the advent of their sophomore album) than Sunny Day Real Estate or Jimmy Eat World. If Coheed was emo, it was by the most tenuous definitions of the term.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this was one of the most important albums of my emo phase.

Discovering this album on Limewire as a tenth grader felt like Bohr finding the atom. It completely demolished everything I thought I knew about music. It had elements of what I was listening to at the time—palm muted power chords, dueling clean and screamed vocals, and huge singalong choruses—but that was such a small part of the sonic palette. There were also fret-shredding guitar solos, odd chord shapes, and song structures that switch direction on a dime.

And then there’s the whole issue of Claudio Sanchez’s voice: a powerful falsetto that knows neither gender nor age. At times he sounds like a warlord emitting a battle cry. At others, a woman weeping. In spots, he sounds like a scared child. I’m not surprised that some people are entirely turned off of Coheed by such an odd and alien voice. But I’m not totally sure any other voice could work to deliver these lyrics, which tell of darkened space stations, genetic experiments, paranormal phenomena, and lovers caught on opposite sides of a war. It seems like nonsense if you’re unfamiliar with The Armory Wars, a comic book that Sanchez also created.

Guitar-solo-heavy sci-fi prog-rock sung by a strange elf-man doesn’t really seem like the way to the hearts of the Hot Topic-set. And judging by the lukewarm reception of later albums, leaning too far that way isn’t a great call. But the reason Coheed caught such an unlikely following on this record (and In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3) was because for all its weirdness, this album is chock full of great pop hooks. Aside from Claudio’s voice and metal riffs, “Devil in Jersey City” is wall-to-wall pop goodness. The chorus of “God Send Conspirator” was sung often and loudly by my sisters and I in my car on the drive to school.

Even darker and weirder tracks were still as catchy as all get out. “Time Consumer” opens with an extended proggy instrumental passage that waits a full minute to kick into pop rock goodness before returning to the opening movement with Bad Brains’ Dr. Know providing an incredible guitar solo. “Everything Evil” opens with a lumbering riff and morose melody before transforming into a major key anthem (I still have to restrain myself from singing along with, “Chelsea! Come look at what your brother did”). The lyrics were nonsense when we all first heard them (the comic’s noteriety took some time to catch up), but that didn’t stop us from shouting along or scribbling them across notebooks and cafeteria tables.

Nearly twenty years later, Coheed has remained more or less consistently active. And while the two albums that followed may be a little more excellently executed, there is a purity to Second Stage Turbine Blade that the longer, more produced, more proficiently played albums can’t touch. And after years of balking at $400 prices on the secondary market, I’m glad to have finally secured a copy—even if it is a bootleg*.

*If anyone cares, the quality of the pressing is pretty solid, barring a skip in “Delirium Trigger” that is inherent to the audio source