Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold
On October 30, 2007, "Avenged Sevenfold", the fourth studio album by the band "Avenged Sevenfold", was released.
When a band names its fourth album after itself, it is usually a statement: this is who we really are. For the five kids from Huntington Beach (vocalist M. Shadows, guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance, bassist Johnny Christ and drummer James "The Rev" Sullivan) it was also a kind of farewell. The kids who started out screaming metalcore on "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" stopped on the road to the stadiums to record an album that sounds like a magician's drawer. It opens with a church organ, closes with a banjo, and in between it packs a choir, a horn section and one eight-minute song that sounds like the soundtrack to an animated horror movie.
The reason for the change of direction has more to do with physics than with art. After the breakthrough of "City of Evil", the band was invited to play in the big league. Shows alongside "Disturbed" and "System of a Down", and then a "Metallica" tour of Europe, in front of tens of thousands of people every night. Shadows later said he understood something simple there. Fast, galloping riffs get swallowed up in huge arenas, while Metallica plays "Sad But True" and "Enter Sandman" from "Metallica (The Black Album)", and every note lands in your stomach. From that a new approach was born. Mid-tempo grooves, big riffs and plenty of air between them, or in his words, a reaction to all the touring. They wrote "Critical Acclaim", "Scream", "Afterlife" and "Almost Easy" with that thought in mind.
It was also the first album the band produced entirely on its own, without an outside producer, at Sunset Sound, Eldorado and Capitol studios in the Los Angeles area. The mix went to Andy Wallace, the man who mixed "Nevermind" by "Nirvana", "Reign in Blood" by "Slayer" and "Toxicity" by "System of a Down", the same band that shared a stage with them. Wallace has mixed every one of the band's albums since "City of Evil".
But anyone who reads the credits discovers that the guiding hand behind the album belonged to the drummer. Sullivan wrote "Almost Easy", "Afterlife" and "A Little Piece of Heaven" on his own, wrote "Brompton Cocktail" together with Shadows, shared the lead vocals with him on several of the songs, and sat down at the piano in between. Looking back, it is hard not to see in this album the blueprint he drew for the band's future.
The story begins with an organ. "Critical Acclaim", the first song written for the album, opens with a dramatic organ intro that bursts into a wall of guitars, and with lyrics that drew accusations of a political tone: lines about people who criticize without doing anything and about soldiers who go unappreciated. Christ responded that it was about a human matter and not an attack on any particular group.
Next comes "Almost Easy", the album's big single, from the pen of Sullivan. It was originally meant for the 2007 movie "Transformers", but wasn't finished in time and ended up in the sequel. The video was directed by P.R. Brown, who also directed for "Mötley Crüe" and Marilyn Manson, and the song went platinum with the RIAA. In 2009 it was even played at the halftime show of the Rose Bowl, performed by the USC marching band.
In "Scream" the opening scream belongs to Valary Sanders, the wife of Shadows, and the A.V. Club reviewer heard a whiff of "Stone Temple Pilots" in it. The song "Afterlife" already seats a string ensemble and an upright bass next to the guitars, and tells of a man who dies, discovers that heaven is pleasant, and realizes he simply isn't ready to stay. Over the years it became one of the most streamed songs in the band's catalog.
And among the big songs hide the stranger ones. "Brompton Cocktail" is named after a painkiller mixture that was common in the treatment of terminal patients, "Gunslinger" begins as a country ballad about a soldier who misses his home and rolls into hard rock, and "Unbound (The Wild Ride)" is the song that Shadows admitted in 2017 is his least favorite of them all. The album closes with "Dear God", a six-and-a-half-minute country-prog ballad that was born, according to Christ, out of the band's friendship with the country duo Big & Rich, with a banjo, a pedal steel and backing vocals by Shanna Crooks.
Then comes "A Little Piece of Heaven", a deranged, psychotic, crazy epic of eight minutes and one second, and the band behaves as if it forgot it was a metal band. Sullivan wrote it alone. His demo was called "Big Bear", and on it he played all the instruments and sang by himself. The song was originally meant for a Halloween EP, until the record label heard it and demanded it be included on the album. The inspiration, according to Sullivan, came from Danny Elfman and his band "Oingo Boingo", and the string, wind and choir arrangements were written by Steve Bartek, the guitarist of that band and Elfman's longtime orchestrator, and Marc Mann. The guitars gave way to horns and violins, and the band itself described the result as an eight-minute movie.
The story it tells, a dark love that ends in murder and in the return of the two lovers from the dead, isn't exactly suitable for children, so its animated video was at first reserved for buyers of the album's multimedia edition only, and reached YouTube only in 2009, but you simply have to watch it.
Critics compared it to "The Black Parade" by "My Chemical Romance" and to "Bohemian Rhapsody" by "Queen", Kerrang! magazine ranked it first on its list of the band's greatest songs, and in a song tournament the band held in 2016, fans chose it as their favorite of them all.
The irony was unavoidable. An album that opens with "Critical Acclaim" received a lukewarm reception from the critics. On Metacritic it scored 56 out of 100 based on thirteen reviews, and PopMatters rated it 2 out of 10 and even mocked the fact that it came out the day before Halloween. But the audience thought differently. The album entered at number four on the Billboard 200 with more than 90,000 copies in its first week, reached number one on Billboard's Alternative, Hard Rock and Rock albums charts, went platinum in the United States and gold in the United Kingdom, and in 2008 was crowned Album of the Year by Kerrang! magazine.
Less than two years later, on December 28, 2009, Sullivan passed away at the age of 28, and this album remained the last one on which he played drums in the band he founded. The band recorded "Nightmare" without him, with Mike Portnoy behind the kit trying to stay true to the demos and to his style, and "Hail to the King" and "The Stage" followed, on which the band kept moving away from the safe formula.
In hindsight, what sounded at the time like a band that hadn't decided who it was turned out to be a decision: to be everything at once, and to sign it with one name. And anyone who has heard "A Little Piece of Heaven" knows who the beating heart behind that decision was.
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