Armor for Sleep, "The Truth About Heaven"

It’s that classic relationship story:

boy meets girl;

boy loses girl;

boy drives car into body of water;

boy finds out heaven is a downer;

boy comes back as ghost stalker;

boy realizes his death (& life) was inconsequential;

boy beats it back to heaven, bummed

Yeah, you’ve heard it all before, but Armor for Sleep breathes new life into the classic Disney formula on the under-appreciated classic What to Do When You’re Dead.

Image: Sherrie Thai, Flickr (CC by 2.0)

Now, I must admit that I kind of have a thing for concept albums about death. I played My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade into the ground (dig deeper and check out “Disenchanted” or “How I Disappear”). But setting aside admittedly disconcerting middle age emo leanings, What to Do When You’re Dead is tremendous.

Pretty sure Pandora turned me on to the album via the lead track “Car Underwater”. On first listen, I remember thinking “hmm, interesting metaphor”, only then to discover that the song was actually, well, about a guy in a car, underwater.

But whatever What to Do When You’re Dead lacks in literary device, it makes up for elsewhere. In lesser hands, this could have devolved into self-involved, one-note “woe is me” blather. Instead, we get an impassioned, self-aware Off-Broadway rock opera just waiting to (never) happen.

You know you’ve made it when some group of mothers blames your music for somebody’s suicide (even if your lyrical message is clearly anti-self-snuff). Back me up here, Ozzy.

But that probably never happened to Armor for Sleep. And that just ain’t right.