REVIEW: Avenged Sevenfold's "Life is but a Dream..." via Warner

I know I’m way past my little cultural moment here but I promised my brother I would review this, he’ll probably regret asking me after reading it, anyway!

Here it is; the eight album by your gateway metal band and mine, Avenged Sevenfold! All seriousness, I have a pretty deep history with this band, they were in a lot of ways my gateway to heavier music, were the headliners at my first concert and while I got really, really tired of all their songs I still hold Waking the Fallen in a special spot. After the classics though I sort of saw A7X as your average arena rock band, they keep making music that everyone talks about for two minutes, they play huge headliners to people who generally stay offline. (Am I judging them or am I jealous?) They just sort of are. Like all big metal bands they’re here to stay. This record seems to be making a huge splash, however, being cited as a progressive masterpiece or the worst thing you ever heard. It also seems like it’s the last A7X record ever? All that being said, while I usually skip their new stuff I had to show up for this one and to be honest?

I sort of regret it.

Before we even get to the experiments conducted on Life is but a Dream I will open with, yes, it’s a metal record at the end of the day. The old Avenged is here in fact on songs like “Mattel” I actually find myself admiring the classic metal and heavy rock sonics mixed with some cool little mellow piano-laced moments. From there though it sort of falls apart. Later on “Mattel” is a solo section that is just, straight up, not very good. The thing is though it’s trying so hard to be different. In that respect it fails to work as an enjoyable part of a song. I can beat the point to death again and again that I want bands to change genres. I don’t want a band to do the thing they’ve already done, ever. There’s no point, I’ve heard City of Evil and don’t need another one, what I need from you is to do bare minimum to make it a song and not a collection of weird guitar stuff that sounds like it’s been written by a high school freshman who just heard about Iron Maiden this morning. Also to close out the old; M. Shadows is a rough lyricist and an even rougher vocalist and only gets worse with age. This man is struggling to get through even track one and that’s just the beginning of a fifty-three and a half minute trek. That and the attempts at Albert Camus-inspired lyricism with lines about things like “plastic daisies?” It’s hard to listen through.

But hey! Band has been on a linear path since ‘99, I actually really admire them trying something different. I just wish they put a little more thought into it.

Moving onto some specific cuts I want to discuss these singles. The lead single, “Nobody” has an instrumental that’s just about interesting, sounding like some sort of power tool, a buzzsaw maybe? And the only thing keeping me from enjoying it is the fact that I’ve heard other bands do this very riff but actually make it sound refined. The instrumental only gets worse from there; it's as if the five of these guys heard that synth made you sound a little different and wrote the most boring guitar parts around the most basic synth riffs. This culminates in a solo section that feels like a band completely going through the motions. Mix that with lyrics that are, again, philosophy inspired but don’t even manage to come off as profound. A lot of this feels like an English class poetry assignment.

The next single was “We Love You,” a song that stuck with me only off of just one listen because of its insanely poor quality. I am not trying to be at all hyperbolic when I say I think this is the worst metal song I have ever heard. First off, the vocal chops at the start of the song, again feel like this band is so late to the party, just heard about that concept and ran to the studio. The “more power” verse is uncomfortable. Like I have a physical reaction to how weird this man sounds chanting these lyrics and when they bring that verse back it's somehow even worse. Speaking of uncomfortable performances this breakdown sounds absolutely AI generated and M. Shadows is struggling to get through this delivery. I need someone to check on this man.

Then the “G-O-D” series, which weren’t singles, but are being talked about as if they were and for good reason. These songs, I think anyway, view humanity from the perspective of its creator and honestly come pretty close to the philosophical presentation that I think they were going for throughout but it comes off as pretty bad. Trying to make God out to be some cool sex symbol might work if it was coming from someone who didn’t constantly sound like they were doing a fourteen year old’s idea of what that guy is. In fact on “G” I almost find a song to genuinely like with this combination of soul-funk, lounge music and thrash performances but I could do without this totally over-acted delivery. I don’t have much to say on “D” and to be honest everyone’s said it but to reiterate, yes, “O” is quite literally a copy-paste of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” Like it’s uncanny.

Outside of the highlights the thing is even when songs are listenable they’re just sort of mid. I’ve heard songs like “Beautiful Morning” from almost every band in A7X’s class and while it's a better song here it’s because it’s a safe haven from everything that makes me dread the experience of it all. That and the piano on this and any other song here is just kind of really boring, again did anyone even try to make this compelling? And I need to reiterate that all of these lyrics are complete non-sequiturs, nothing feels stitched together and it all just sounds like it was written to say it's a concept record without actually doing the work to make it one. The worst part is this album’s cycle reminds me of why I have such disdain for the metal fanbase in the first place. If I have to read one more comment about how the album is bad because of auto-tune I’m going to pop a blood vessel. This album isn’t bad because of auto-tune, auto-tune can be good please just grow up you aren’t twelve years old hearing Metallica for the first time anymore. The album is bad because the songs, the production, the performances, the lyrics and the decision making altogether are bad.

Our rating - 3/10

1. Game Over
2. Mattel
3. Nobody
4. We Love You
5. Cosmic
6. Beautiful Morning
7. Easier
8. G
9. (O)rdinary
10. (D)eath
11. Life is but a Dream...

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