Avenged Sevenfold: An Album Review
I’m going to take a tangent topic again, and do an album review of the new self-titled Avenged Sevenfold release…
Avenged Sevenfold, the band that openly states “we want to be the biggest band in the world”, put out the record they wrote by locking themselves into a garage with all their own equipment for months. Why does it matter? It’s simple: there were no claims of “the heaviest album yet” or “the most technical” or even “back to our roots”, the claim of “we’re going to piss off alot of our fans” was made from day 1… find any interview they’ve done about the album.
Surprise! This appears on the album.
And it’s true.
Vocals
M. Shadows doesn’t do “full” screaming vocals anymore, but this is nothing new. We saw the beginnings of this on the last album, “City of Evil”, and if you’ve seen them live in the last two years or so, you know about it. The “half scream” or, as I like to call it, “strained vocals that sound gravelly” is used in place of the screaming.
This in itself isn’t a huge deal, vocal styles change as people mature or get injured (Look at a band like Arch Enemy. The vocals have been changing, progressively for the better, with each album.). But you have to put it together with the rest of the album’s dynamics…
I iz whiney. Wholedz me?
Song Structure
There are three kinds of songs on this album: “heavy” [close to the older A7X material], “ballad”, and “weird”. Again, not a bad thing. But there are also three kinds of guitars: “normal”, “whiny”, and “stereotypical solo”.
There is almost no song maturation on this album… the heavy songs are just like they always have been (with the exception of “Scream”… that’s a good song); the ballads are still whiny and soft; the solos still use the same combination of halfway-distorted guitars, alot of echo/delay, and typical sweeps and progressions; and acoustic guitars are used to add “texture” when the song is not very interesting.
Continuity
Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought the word “album” was defined as “a group of songs that together makes a coherent whole of musically interesting recordings with some main theme”, because this so-called album does not have any of that. Yes, the solos are predictable. And, yes, the guitars are boring. But that doesn’t create a musical identity.
Each song sounds different from the others on the album, as if it was written without anything behind it more than “this is a cool riff!” You want examples? Ok.
- “Unbound” sounds like Nickelback crossed with Yngwie Malmsteen and some swing band
- “Scream” sounds like old A7X
- “Brompton Cocktail” sounds like Apocalyptica crossed with Limp Bizkit
- “A Little Piece of Heaven” sounds like Halloween meets folk music (aka “crap”)
And what the hell is up with those vocals that are altered to sound like robots? Seriously.
The Image
At a certain point, a band should be forced to re-evaluate it’s image. A7X has always been …interesting… in their image, with each band member distinctly showing their own influences. But can you continue to look “evil”, “hardcore”, and “metal” when each album you put out is less original and heavy than the last one? What about when you are openly targeting the MTV audience?
Let’s be real, guys. You should take a page from Nickelback now.
Sucks
To put it all quite bluntly, the album sucks. There are a small handful of songs that are interesting and good to listen to, but the rest of the album makes me want to delete everything I have of theirs.
Seriously, this is worse than when Trivium put out “The Crusade”.
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