The Creative Energy of Avenged Sevenfold
Today is the birthday of Matthew Charles Sanders who is none other than the frontman of the American metal band avenged sevenfold better known as M.Shadows. To celebrate him, here below you can read our review of his group’s latest album, “Life Is But a Dream…”released in June 2023, seven years after “The stage” (read here the review).
They are back avenged sevenfold. They returned with their eighth album, “Life Is But a Dream…”. The Californian band’s production had as its last chapter the excellent “The stage”released in October 2016. A period of time that would have been shorter if in the meantime the world had not experienced the Covid-19 pandemic up close. The group wanted the album release to be followed by a concert presentation, so they waited until health conditions normalized and allowed them to perform live.
Avenged Sevenfold wrote and recorded the album over the course of four years and, as in the previous “The stage”, they put human life at the center of their work. There the lyrics (a little pessimistic) were inspired by the writings of scientists such as Carl Sagan and by Elon Musk’s vision of artificial intelligence, now the source they have drawn from is the French existentialist writer and philosopher Albert Camus who at the center of his work placed the observation of the disturbances of the human soul in the face of the difficulties of life.
Shadows, Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengeance, Johnny Christ and Brooks Wackerman have not spared themselves in terms of creative energy in this new musical adventure and have not been afraid to combine the sounds of the most canonical metal – the one with which they are naturally associated given their past – with sudden changes of pace and genre that lead their music to explore other shores.
Take “Game over” as an example, the song that opens the album (but it’s not the only one): it starts with a sweet guitar arpeggio to suddenly launch into a wild ride that doesn’t forget to have a certain melody, then leaves room for an electric solo, returns to the melodic part and finally returns to a bucolic place of peace to close with the words that give the album its title, ‘Life is but a dream’. This is the outline of the first half of the album, but as the songs follow one another the sounds of the album become less and less tied to hard rock and we find ourselves listening to really everything. “(O)rdinary” recalls Daft Punk, while “(D)eath” seems to be taken from a musical and the closing is entrusted to the title track, an instrumental for solo piano that, in truth, in addition to being completely unexpected, pushes towards the dream.
You feel sympathy – as you wouldn’t otherwise – for the man in trouble portrayed by Avenged Sevenfold in the songs of “Life Is But a Dream…” which is a concept album with its own precise line from a lyrical point of view while from a sonically one it is quite misaligned and unstitched. But this is precisely where the skill of the group lies, the sleight of hand succeeds, the mayonnaise doesn’t go crazy and the final result is more than good. For my part, I appreciated the ability and inventiveness of the band that from the height of its quality in mastering the subject manages to successfully push itself to propose an ambitious work. In short, I am convinced by the new album by Avenged Sevenfold, but the final judgment, the most important one, as always, will be given by the fans.
