plorentz's Full Review: Avenged Sevenfold [PA] by Avenged Sevenfold
A couple months ago, when I chanced upon a song called "Critical Acclaim" on iTunes, the lead single from California metal quintet Avenged Sevenfold's self-titled fourth album, I was struck by a couple of things. First, for what it was - that is, a vicious, epic, wartime rant against the people Bill O'Reilly might call "Blame America First Liberals" (a group for which, by the Fox anchor's criteria, I almost certainly qualify) - the song was incredibly persuasive and impossibly catchy. I kept finding angry snippets of lyrics - like me, motherfucker! - barging in on my brain at all sorts of inopportune times, and ransacking my otherwise tranquil mental state as if it were the well-appointed livingroom of, say, Harry Reid. I remember thinking that this is the kind of heavy metal that Dick Cheney would love.
I also remember thinking that Avenged Sevenfold sounded like the kind of band I would have hated in high school, which speaks not so much to how my taste in music has broadened in the last 20 years, but to the fact that the song sounded like it came to the band after a freaky, freaky dream in which they were visited, Flight of the Conchords-style by 1986 Metallica (from the Master of Puppets tour!). The precision and enthusiasm with which the band (intentionally or otherwise) recreated every familiar stereotype of the glorious thrash metal of yore would seem enviable even to Bret and Jemaine: the solemn, "classical" intro, a Hetfield-style jager-fueled howl, Mustaine-ish demon spit diatribes, bass drum barrages of machine gun speed and locomotive rhythm riffs - it's all there. And I beheld its splendor and fixed my radar on the full-length album's release date.
Only to find that much of the splendor of Avenged Sevenfold and nearly all of its incendiary political rage (no matter how ultimately disagreeable) is bottled up like a Molotov cocktail in those first five minutes of kid-tested, Republican-approved rage, while the rest of the album concerns itself mainly with suicidal love songs. Which isn't to say that the rest of the album is awful. Lead vocalist M. Shadows and his crew are certainly not lacking in ambition or musical vision. All old school metal posturing (and Shadows' reputation as a screamer) notwithstanding, the guys have a way with earworm pop melodies, as they unabashedly demonstrate on songs like "Afterlife", whose serrated power chords on the volume-to-eleven verses periodically give way to a chorus so petulantly emo you'd swear they'd stolen it from Simple Plan; or the closing ballad "Dear God", a song so full of heart-in-my-hands yearning (and pedal-steel guitar) that really it's only a couple of lyrical adjustments away from being Carrie Underwood's next monster single. Seriously.
But that's just it. The band tries to cram too many musical ideas, to incorporate too many - how shall we put it? - interesting sounds, to take too many conceptual chances with these songs, that all the nifty little bits, especially as the disc wears on, start to feel gratuitous, if not just an outright mask for shallow songwriting. The best songs here are generally the least gimmicky, but it seems like the band made a conscious effort to give every track here some kind of unexpected textural hook, be it the Eastern percussions which open "Brompton Cocktail" and color it throughout (and, with all due respect, Mastodon has already charted this territory, with stronger results), the wholly unnecessarily vocodered vocals of "Lost", or the florid piano arpeggios (talk about tickling the ivories) that swirl around the verses of the speeding-bullet-fast "Unbound (The Wild Ride)" like glitter in a freshly shaken snow globe. "Gunslinger" is essentially a spaghetti western with power chords and a gothic choir.
But nowhere does the band jump the shark more spectacularly than on the epic "A Little Piece of Heaven", a ridiculous eight minute chunk of tacky rock opera - check out those oom-pah horns and b-movie score orchestrations - which owes as much to My Chemical Romance and Queen as it does to community theater and Weekly World News. If the song's supposed to be funny, the joke is sorely misplaced and simply falls flat. Though it clearly aspires to be - and let's not kid ourselves here - this is no "Bohemian Rhapsody." But even if it were, it wouldn't belong on this record the way Queen's masterpiece belongs to and heightens A Night at the Opera: that album was full of playfulness and whimsy and imbued throughout with a mordant sense of humor, even despite its very palpable rage. If we're supposed to take "A Little Bit of Heaven" even remotely seriously (as the comparative humorlessness of the surrounding album might suggest), then we're laughing in all the wrong places. It's a painful, horrific conceptual misstep, and it's hard not to be embarrassed for the band when you're listening to it.
Avenged Sevenfold would have done themselves (and us) a big favor by saving the money they spent on horn sections and concert pianists, and concentrating their ideas into what they could produce by themselves. Their over-reliance on effects and gimmicks only gives the album a general vibe of insecurity - of trying too hard - when, as "Critical Acclaim" proved, they've got a powerful core of their own. I've no doubt that this is one talented band. But, instead of self-producing their records (as they do here), they could use a drill sergeant's discipline to help them focus, strengthen, and, for god's sake, edit their ideas into something more uniformly solid, decisive, and uncompromised. And when/if they finally do tighten up their act, they will have earned my undying devotion.
- - - - -
BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Avenged Sevenfold" by Avenged Sevenfold
Warner Bros. Records
Released 10/30/07
Produced by Avenged Sevenfold
53 min.
SONGS: Critical Acclaim - Almost Easy - Scream - Afterlife - Gunslinger - Unbound (The Wild Ride) - Brompton Cocktail - Lost - A Little Piece of Heaven - Dear God
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
![Avenged Sevenfold [PA] by Avenged Sevenfold](http://di1.shopping.com/images1/pi/e1/9a/61/2045056977-177x150-0-0.jpg)
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.