Album A Day: Avenged Sevenfold – Avenged Sevenfold

I have an odd relationship with Avenged Sevenfold. It has less to do with their music itself (but I’ll get to that in a second) and more to do with their fanbase. First, I don’t think I’ve ever met a male Avenged Sevenfold fan. Not being sexist, just putting it out there. And the females I know who do like A7X, they have this tendecy to be…well, from my experience they’re…OK I’ll just come out and say it. They’re fucking crazy. Seriously. Only once have I met a girl who said she liked Avenged Sevenfold that after talking to her for a length of time, I felt comfortable potentially bringing home (she and I ended up not dating. And for the record, that population of fans I know includes one ex-girlfriend and several friends of others. *Waves to parents who are probably reading this*). It’s not that I don’t like their music or actively avoid listening to it because of these people. It’s just that I can’t listen to the band without thinking about these people, so I think twice about doing so (Fact: this phenomenon is also true about AFI).

Now that that’s all out there, Avenged Sevenfold isn’t a terrible album. It’s not my favorite album by the band, mostly because this album pretty clearly wants to recreate the commercial success of “Bat Country” and “The Beast and the Harlot”. Where its predecessor City of Evil was a balls-out metal album, the self-titled album is more introspective and reserved. It still carries a huge punch in songs like “Critical Acclaim” and “Scream”, but those songs are sharing album space with the acoustically driven “Gunslinger” and “Lost”. The shift in sound is clearly evident on “Unbound (The Wild Ride)”, which clearly ends up on the metal side of the spectrum, but its more subdued and refined than the same song would have been on previous albums. There’s nothing wrong with Avenged Sevenfold wanting radio spins, but after “Bat Country” was such an uncompromising success, I question whether or not it makes sense to come to the mainstream, when the mainstream was willing to come to them. That said, mad points to Avenged Sevenfold for being the metal band who isn’t too badass to harmonize and promote melody and rhythm and all those things that make “normal” music good.

Avenged Sevenfold – Almost Easy [iTunes] (YSI)

==TJ==