Avenged Sevenfold - The Stage

I have long history with Avenged Sevenfold. Back in 2007 Electronic Arts released a game called Need for Speed: ProStreet, the game had a song called Almost Easy among others in its soundtrack. The song had a chorus which goes "Come back to me it's almost easy"  my teenage mind loved it, it was fast, heavy and it had a wicked guitar solo. It was my first introduction to heavy music of any kind, since then it had been quite a journey from hard rock to the bleak waters dissonant black metal.

Avenged Sevenfold is a band that doesn't like to stay at one place too long. They started off as a metalcore band and they were to be honest nothing special in a sea of similar New Wave of American Heavy Metal (NWOAHM) acts that combined At the Gates riffs with hardcore punk breakdowns. Things took a different and interesting turn with a release of City of Evil in the year 2005. They abandoned harsh vocals and adopted a more traditional hard rock and power metal aesthetics, people started noticing their talents especially lead guitarist Synyster Gates and drummer The Rev. They went even more preposterous with their self titled release two years later, an outlandish mix of hard rock, symphonic rock, Gothic, avant-garde metal and even country music. 

In a sad turn of events they lost their drummer and friend James "The Rev" Sullivan two years later. They as a consequence released a darker and somber record in Nightmare a year later with the help of former Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. The Rev was not just a drummer, he was one of their main songwriters and some of their most loved songs like Afterlife, A Little Piece of Heaven and Almost Easy were written entirely by him. With his loss the band lost their sense of wackiness and the follow up Hail to the King was so inspired by their idols that it eventually turned out to be their most uninspired work.

The band recruited Brooks Wackerman of Bad Religion on drums and surprised everyone when they released The Stage out of nowhere.

Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance

The Stage was released without any promotion whatsoever thus becoming the first heavy metal album to do so but the surprise part was the album itself. I have no reservations in saying this but The Stage is one of the greatest progressive metal record released this decade. It is a concept record about artificial intelligence taking over and mankind finding solace and humbleness in the infinite cosmos.

The band makes the statement of progressive intend right on the onset by opening the album with an 8 minute song. The title track shifts through various tempos and moods but M. Shadows brings the song right at home with a hooky poetic chorus with memorable lines like "Tell me a lie in a beautiful way I believe in answers just not today". In an attempt to add the color black to the metal platter they introduce blast beats and tremolo picking runs over the mournful verses of Fermi Paradox which also features a flanged out drum beats in its breakdown. Simulation amps up the drama with spoken word passages and sound samples and an overall chaotic song arrangements that gets even more insane when Synyster Gates and Brooks Wackerman battle out in a wild solo session. Horns and trumpets blare along with the riffs in the song Sunny Disposition in the record's most sinister moment and the same wind instruments give way to Shadow's euphoric "Dear radiation my sweet friend Let agents dance upon my nerves"

No matter how good you are with your instruments or how sprawling your composition is, you need hooks to anchor it down, all the songs here has at least one memorable vocal line. The band has gathered a loyal following over the years with their catchy fun and heavy compositions. Avenged Sevenfold knows their audience and has no plans in disappointing them, God Damn is the more aggressive and wilder cousin of Natural Born Killer of Nightmare with an opening start stop riff that appears again on Higher. Paradigm even goes back to their metalcore days with shadows delivering a scream at the chorus, breakdowns get even more weirder and intresting with the band's new found progressive leanings such as the one in Simulation.

M. Shadows and Johnny Christ

Avenged Sevenfold has never made secret of their love for Guns N' Roses, you can see their influence right to their use stage names and like their idols they too can pen a heart wrenching ballad. Every Avenged Sevenfold record has at least one, The Stage has two. Angles the most traditional of the two sees Shadows getting all emotional on the chorus

  "Mother wash the devil from my hands

Pray the Lord I have the strength to stand

Mother, tell me was it all a lie?

       Show me where the angels die"       

Gates goes all Slash in an equally emotive outro solo. Roman Sky on the other had is cinematic and sprawling in scope with string sessions and a clean guitar solo before going all pompous with the orchestras. It is really beautiful when Shadows sing these lines accompanied by the strings 

"Just before you go, tell us how the heavens flow 

Weightless evermore, as you walk beyond that door

Shine forever true" 

These emotional humane lyrics gets intertwined within the album having a man versus machine concept. Paradigm discusses plight of a man who lost his human self in an attempt to devoid himself of all defects of being a mortal (Engineer the wires to your brain, architect a code so you won't feel the pain... I stare at my reflection, have I lost that boy inside?). Artificial intelligence takeover becomes the subject of Creating God ("Devouring the very last invention man would ever need but exponential growth is a frightening thing, indeed")    

The song Higher discusses the possibility of leaving Earth with space travel as a way to escape the mess we created ("Came a million miles and the earth grows small as I lovingly leave it behind"). There are billions of stars in our galaxy that are similar to our Sun and there is a high probability of them having Earth like planets and at least some of them should have intelligent life that should have already visited us. There is no evidence for it whatsoever prompting the physics Enrico Fermi to ask "Where is everybody ?". This contradiction is popularly called "The Fermi Paradox" which forms the backdrop of the song Fermi Paradox.

         

Brooks Wackerman

The closer Exist needs a paragraph of its own, at 15 minutes and 41 seconds it is a song worthy to be named alongside the great prog rock epics. The song is the sonic representation of the big bang, with an explosive opening of dueling leads and intense drumming calming down slowly as the minutes pass by. The introduction of vocals represents the creation of Earth with Shadows crooning the words "Our truth is painted across the sky, in our reflection we learn to fly". The song ends with a monologue by American astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson about how small and insignificant we are in the infinite span of the universe.

I am usually averse to science fiction themes on records, the widely acclaimed recent records by Vektor, Blood Incantation and Artificial Brain did nothing for me. I like my musical themes to hark back to the days of olde but the emotional warmth the band brought with their songwriting won me over. A lot of this has to do with the production. This could have been another of those loud sterile modern production cases considering the band's popularity instead what we get is a dynamic record that brims with life, the one that puts all the "loudness war" causalities to shame. As if a surprise release was not enough the band swims against the current by releasing a quite dynamic record. For all the hate the band receives for being "less metal" I wonder if any of our favorite extreme metal luminaries will be as daring.       

This is the longest post on this blog and the record deserves each and every word of it (Miss Guess What ?, thank you for your patience). It was a pleasant surprise when the band released this album on October 28, 2016, no one saw this coming. I remember waking up that day to this news and checking out iTunes to find the entire album available for purchase. 

This is Avenged Sevenfold's  best work so far and ask any A7X fan, they will tell you their follow up to The Stage will be nothing like The Stage. That's Avenged Sevenfold for you and this is the crux of my fandom.

All photos featured here are from their official website.

   

LINKS FOR YOUR ENLIGHTENMENT

Avenged Sevenfold   At the Gates   Guns N' Roses

Loudness War  

Tribulation - Down Below

Sounds we hear always paint a picture on our minds, music paints either the sun or the moon atop that landscape art. An album to me is an uncharted land waiting to be explored and whenever I walk through them it's either day or night. An album is not just a collection of songs the artist happened to write and record during the course of few months but an amalgamation of influences, personal reflections, artistic vision and evolution the band would like to project. They project these with their music, lyrics, album art, liner notes, band photos, music videos and even with their live shows. The records that you hear therefore caress more senses than the sense of hearing. Yours truly here therefore classify albums as "day albums" and "night albums".  

Day albums are the ones that sounds warm and lively, all the sludge, stoner, groove and trash metal albums fall into this category. The death metal bands having oriental influence like Behemoth and Nile conjures images of Arabian desserts and Egyptian gods, hence all of their albums are day albums. Songs of war, glory and majesty are day for those happen under the sun and that's how Amon Amrath, Bolt Thrower and Manowar got their albums tagged under day. Night albums on the other hand are cold and a bit achromic, most black metal albums fall into this and so does the Goth influenced. The "grim and evil" side of heavy metal are forever nocturnal and they always dwell under the light that never warms. It also helps when the band makes it clear with their album titles and artworks like the albums Nocturnal and Nightbringers by The Black Dahlia Murder or In the Nightside Eclipse by Emperor.       

Down Below by the Swedish band Tribulation is the quintessential night album. The band has been toying with the idea of night and its beings since moving away from their Swedish death metal roots to a more Gothic influenced in the album The Children of the Night. Three years later the idea becomes fully realized in the band's fourth record which almost sounds like The Cure playing death metal and that my friends is a compliment.

The Gothic subculture has its passionate romance, the ever present melancholy and the fetish towards the color black but Down Below is very much a death metal album. If it was just death metal then there is nothing new to hear or worthy to write about. It is all made clear in the second song Nightbound if you put the lyric in a different context.

"I remember, I remember who we are 

and the long night comes with grace" 

Yes the riffs do come with grace and every lick every note here is a thing of beauty and yes they do remember their death metal.

The album opens with The Lament, starting with moody clean guitars before going late 70s heavy metal with the riffing. However it's when we reach the chorus that we meet the band's cynosure. Adam Zaars and Jonathan Hultén writes truly infectious leads, when Johannes Andersson screams "Would we see you if you came to us?" it is the chorus lead riff that hooks you. The song Lady Death too spots a chorus lead that the band develops into a guitar solo and the same riff is used as a motif throughout the song.

Lacrimosa is Down Below at its heaviest with its double bass rolls and a more menacing tone with the guitar riffs and leads. It even features Gregorian chants and church bells in the middle giving the song a spooky Ghost vibe. The song ends with some cold piano notes and with it on a melancholic note. Pianos and syths comes in and out in the ominous sounding Cries from the Underworld, the song features a Pink Floydian  guitar solo at around the 2 minute mark and an ambient breakdown leading to even more Floydian solos.

Johannes Andersson vocals is the only thing that keeps the record in deathy realms, he sounds like a more restrained Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquility. His bass work is praiseworthy as well, often taking part in the counterpoint with the two guitarist and he even does a bass solo in The Lament. The new drummer Oscar Leander brings an earthy jazzy fell to the songs with creative fills and patterns such as the tom filled drum parts in The World or the swinging beats in the middle of Lacrimosa.

It is hard not to miss the "lady" in the lyrics. Most the songs here refer to a particular women, even the artwork has a lady in it (right below the bird's neck). In The Lament the women is named Sophia

"But we mourn

We mourn the death of Sophia"

Lady Death describes her as "beautiful and severe, graceful yet fierce" and proclaims "In the depths of  your mystic darkness, I must die".  In the flowing song Subterranea, she who is

"Dolorous

Lifeless in her gaze

Blank reflection a memory merged with the haze

Rabid, in fervor"

brings the singer "Down below", "In eternities alone". Finally in the last song the epic Here Be Dragons the narrator warns the listener about her. The phrase "Here be dragons" refers to the old practice of drawing dragons or monsters on the uncharted areas of maps warning whoever that dares to pass through those lands and seas. The narrator "bowed and took her by the hand"  only to realize 

"Here be dragons

Here be death

Here be the sombre that have felt the Devil's breath"

The lady referred here can be literal or metaphorical but this small concept ties the album together and gives credence to the long lost art of hearing the album in one go.

It is really hard to listen to this on a sunny day, Down Below draws a picture of moonlit woods and a distant castle obscured by a shroud of fog. We walk through those twilight shadows and gets enchanted by the visuals the music paints. The albums has a very retro late 70s feel due to its guitar and drum tones, polished enough to highlight the instrumental flair. 

The record was released on January 26th and it took me months to finally write about it. It checks every box of what I like in heavy music, it's progressive, dark and emotionally heavy with some intricate guitar playing that gets better and better with every listen. It is nice to hear a band expanding their sound and incorporating their influences without losing their identity. Of all the bands that released music this year Tribulation's follow up to Down Below is the one I look forward to, we will never know where this evolution is going to take them.                 

Down Below is available for purchase on Century Media Records. 

LINKS FOR YOUR ENLIGHTENMENT

Tribulation   The Cure   Ghost   Pink Floyd

       Dark Tranquility   Gothic Rock