"The band's debut album, The Second Stage Turbine Blade is actually the second chapter in their multi-album Sci-Fi concept, which also has a corresponding comic book series. Coheed and Cambria are main characters in this story (I wonder what they plan on doing when they're done with this concept series). This multi-album concept idea, as many of us know at this point, has been done before (immediately Magma comes to mind), but of course the MTV crowd is not used to this, so the band has been lauded for such a feat. However, the band was still pretty much an underground band when this thing came out, and didn't really see fame until after this album's successor.
The album opens with the title track, which is a 50-second intro that introduces a musical motif that the band would incorporate into their future albums. This flows into Time Consumer, which opens with a nice drum & bass groove accompanied by a very cool, clean dual guitar riff and then moves into an interesting poppy alternative rock song. I would have liked to hear more development of that awesome intro (underdevelopment would prove to be one of their problems in later albums), but the song is still very good nevertheless, and they do end up bringing the intro riff back along with a guitar solo by Dr. Know of Bad Brains (interesting choice). I suppose if any track on here sounds emo, it would be the bulk of this song." (ProgArchives review)