A prog-rock angst-ridden sci-fi saga

Young band Coheed and Cambria has released two concept albums following the doomy sci-fi saga of two fictional characters (named Coheed and Cambria) through a churning musical landscape of 21st century prog-rock. So one half expected to see teenage geeks dressed like Klingons or Jedi knights amid the capacity Troubadour crowd gathered to hear the upstate New York quartet on Wednesday.

Instead, the club was packed with young men and women who roiled and sang along with every word. It wasn’t clear whether they all knew the songs’ back stories, but the venting of angst needs no justification, regardless of how high-concept that angst might be.

The hour-plus set by the hard-touring indie up-and-comers was tight but expansive, offering plenty of complex, minor-key riffs, pounding drumbeats and singer-guitarist Claudio Sanchez’s echo-laden, dramatic vocals. Drawn from 2002’s “The Second Stage Turbine Blade” and last year’s “In Keeping the Secrets of Silent Earth: 3,” the tunes at times strongly recalled Rush, but cross-pollinated with more modern sounds such as Fugazi or System of a Down.

From under his massive, mushroom-head Afro, Sanchez keened bleak and fanciful lines quite seriously, but his declamatory style and the band’s sprawling tendencies became slightly tedious. Still, the music’s buoyant, almost comical quality kept things from getting too miserable.