Avenged Sevenfold - The Stage
On October 28, 2016, "The Stage", the seventh studio album by the band "Avenged Sevenfold", was released.
The mid-2000s brought "Avenged Sevenfold" to a critical and fascinating crossroads. Three years earlier, in 2013, the quintet from Huntington Beach, California had topped the charts worldwide with their sixth album, "Hail to the King", a polished display of traditional hard rock and heavy metal that paid homage to the genre's giants of the 1980s and 1990s, such as "Metallica", "Guns N' Roses", and "Black Sabbath". However, it was precisely from this dizzying commercial success that a strong artistic hunger arose among the band members to shatter the mainstream mold in which they had been placed and reinvent themselves. In parallel with the musical search process, the band underwent significant business and personal upheaval when they waged a high-profile legal battle to be released from their recording contract with Warner Bros. Records and moved to her new home at Capitol Records, and at the same time parted ways with drummer Arin Ilejay, realizing that the complex vision of the next album required a completely different kind of rhythmic engine.
The answer was found in the person of one of the most brilliant, versatile and respected drummers in the rock world, Brooks Wackerman, who for many years drove the legendary punk-rock band "Bad Religion" and collaborated with bands as diverse as "Suicidal Tendencies", "Infectious Grooves" and "Tenacious D". Even before Wackerman's addition was revealed to the media and fans, vocalist M. Shadows, guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance and bassist Johnny Christ had locked themselves in with him for months of intensive writing and secret rehearsals. The immediate chemistry with Walkerman, who combined the dizzying speed of thrash metal with a phenomenal mastery of asymmetrical scales, polyrhythms, and dynamics from the world of jazz and prog, opened up compositional horizons for the band that they had never dared to explore before, since the heyday of the band's late and beloved drummer Jimmy Sullivan, known as The Rev, on the albums "City of Evil" from 2005 and "Nightmare" from 2010.
To translate this ambition into a live, organic, digitally-unmanipulated studio sound, the band enlisted legendary super-producer and sound engineer Joe Barresi, who has previously worked with "Tool", "Queens of the Stone Age", "Soundgarden", and "Alice in Chains", to the production table. Recording took place at United, Capitol, and Serenity West Studios in Hollywood, as well as Barresi's own studio in Pasadena, consciously avoiding artificial drum samples or rigid computer editing. The result was a spectacular philosophical and scientific concept album inspired by the writings of Carl Sagan, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking. At its center are the biggest and most disturbing questions of the twenty-first century, the rise of artificial intelligence and the blurring of man and machine, nanotechnology, simulation theories, religious and political hypocrisy, and the eternal search for intelligent life in the vastness of the universe.
The manner in which the album was released was also revolutionary and unprecedented in the history of the metal industry. Wanting to restore the mystery and excitement lost to the album art in the era of internet leaks and exhausting marketing campaigns, the band kept the existence of the album a complete secret. On October 13, 2016, only the opening single was released, and two weeks later, on the night of October 27, 2016, the band performed a spectacular live performance on the roof of the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood, which was broadcast live in 3D virtual reality to millions of viewers around the world. At the end of the performance, the band announced that the full album was available for listening and purchase at that very moment, thus becoming the first heavy rock band in history to carry out a complete surprise launch on a global scale, including vinyl editions and physical discs sent to stores under secret code names.
The conceptual journey begins with the eight-and-a-half-minute masterpiece that bears the album's title, "The Stage", a song that earned the band a prestigious Grammy Award nomination in the Best Rock Song category. The song opens with a virtuoso drum parade by Brooks Wackerman and a mesmerizing guitar arpeggio in the trapezes of Synyster Gates, before exploding into a heavy, racing riff. M. Shadows's sharp lyrics present human history as a brutal theatrical performance of war, corruption, and mass control, accompanied by an epic puppet theater video directed by Chris Hopewell, in which the figure of Death pulls the strings of world rulers throughout the ages. In the song's bridge, the listener experiences a thrilling flamenco acoustic transition that develops into one of the greatest melodic and technical solos of Gates' career.
Immediately after that comes "Paradigm", a sharp and fast prog-metal piece that deals with the implantation of nanorobots in the human body and the loss of the human image in favor of mechanical immortality, in which M. Shadows' rough and mature voice moves between theatrical melodies and existential cries against a backdrop of bouncy and unexpected drumming. On the third track, "Sunny Disposition", the band surprises with a brilliant and dark combination of brass instruments, trumpets and trombones from the world of swing and avant-garde inspired by the band "Mr. Bungle", which create a fascinating cabaret satire on nuclear war and the indifference of the capitalists.
Pure aggression returns to center stage on the crushing second single "God Damn", a modern thrash metal anthem, fast-paced and fast-paced, that takes on the cult of personality, religious fanaticism and the enslavement of free thought. The song combines sawing riffs in an intense double bass with a sweeping stadium chorus, and ends with a breathtaking Spanish acoustic guitar solo by Synyster Gates that seals the electric storm with surprising elegance.
At the heart of the album lies a deep and complex musical division that ranges from heavy to psychedelic. "Creating God" boasts a heavy groove reminiscent of the Seattle grunge scene combined with Walkerman's incredibly technical and complex drum rhythm, describing how humans turn technology and computers into their new gods. It is followed by "Angels", a slow, dark and contemplative piece built on a prominent bass line by Johnny Christ and bluesy, floating guitar work by Zacky Vengeance and Synyster Gates, and leads into "Simulation", one of the most theatrical and extreme songs on the album. The song combines a quiet, soothing ballad with brutal metal outbursts and dramatic spoken word passages depicting a man discovering that his entire life is a computerized illusion inside a closed ward.
The second half of the album soars into sublime cosmic and emotional realms. "Higher" is a masterful progressive piece that opens with a soaring drum beat and atmospheric guitars, builds to an uplifting chorus, and ends with a celestial choir of angels and string accompaniment dedicated to the astronauts who went into space and never returned. It is immediately followed by the epic and chilling ballad "Roman Sky", which tells the tragic story of the Italian scientist, philosopher, and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 by the Inquisition for daring to claim that the universe is infinite and that the Earth is not the center of creation. The rich orchestral arrangement and Gates' melodic, tearful solo make the song one of the most moving moments in the band's catalog.
The space journey continues with "Fermi Paradox", a dark, melodic and hypnotic song named after physicist Enrico Fermi's scientific paradox that asks why we have yet to find evidence of extraterrestrial life in such a vast universe, and combines fast blast beats with dreamy guitar melodies. All of which prepares the ground for the album's signature masterpiece, "Exist", a monumental progressive epic of fifteen minutes and forty-one seconds, the longest and most ambitious song in "Avenged Sevenfold" history. The work is structured as a three-movement symphony that musically recounts the story of the creation of the universe, starting with the Big Bang, described in seven stormy instrumental minutes of pure virtuosity on guitars, keyboards, and drums, through the appearance of human life on Earth in M. Shadows' calm and moving vocal section, and ending with the chilling ending in which the voice of renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is heard in a moving philosophical monologue written especially for the album, calling on humanity to rise above its petty wars and look together toward the stars.
The album's complete artistic vision is sealed by its spectacular cover, which features the band's iconic bat skull symbol, the Deathbat, composed of a purple cosmic nebula glowing in the depths of space, a visual work that connects the band's familiar identity with the infinite spaces that the album deals with. In December 2017, the band even expanded the project as promised with a rich deluxe edition that included the original song "Dose" alongside a series of fascinating cover versions of classics by "Pink Floyd", "The Rolling Stones", "The Beach Boys" and "Mr. Bungle".
Upon its release, "The Stage" was met with enthusiastic praise from music critics around the world, who hailed it as the band's most mature, bold and intelligent album yet, and it rocketed straight to number four on the US Billboard 200 and number one on the Rock and Metal Albums charts in the US and the UK. Standing the test of time, "The Stage" stands as a seminal milestone in 21st century metal, an album in which a giant band at the height of its power dared to forgo commercial comfort, look to the future with open eyes and create a timeless masterpiece that proves that metal has no limits.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
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