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