Review Summary: Avenged Sevenfold creates an album so confusing they can't even name it.
True, there's been plenty of bands looking to change their direction over the years, but they'll usually have enough of an idea where they're going to at least make a cohesive album. This might be the only self-titled album I can think of where I truly believe it's only self-titled because they literally couldn't think of anything else to call this, but after seeing a few other reviews I'm sure most of the Sputnik crowd could think of a few things.
Admittedly, not every single song on Avenged Sevenfold is bad, just most of them. And on an album of only 10 songs, that's not really a great track record. "Afterlife" I can admit is a great song and my favorite of the album, mixing heavy metal with a relatively conservative amount of orchestration at the right places to add depth and make the song a little bit more than just your average metal song. I also enjoyed Almost Easy (as awkwardly overproduced as it sounds), and Gunslinger and Critical Acclaim (minus the mid-song political ranting) I could even consider okay songs.
But then there were those other songs…"Scream" has a decent live performance, featuring pyrotechnics, trashy gyrating girls, and some actual enthusiasm, but strip all those things away and you have the dullest song about committing rape I've ever heard. "Dear God" is a boringly average country ballad that proves that A7X needs to stay away from both country and ballads, and "Unbound" isn't much more than just a laundry list of gimmicks like roller coaster guitar lines and having children sing your lines all pancaked into one song that finally starts to show that these guys really did have no idea where they were going with this.
"Brompton Cocktail" I almost enjoyed (once its 30 second intro was finally over) but it never really picked up quite as well as I thought it should've. But any hope it could've gave me was shattered when I came across the album's epitome of musical inept-ness, the aptly-titled "Lost". "Lost" is so broken and gimmicky that it doesn't even make musical sense. Where did the idea come from to combine thrash metal verses with an almost pop rock-sensible chorus? And whoever decided that using a vocoder during the chorus was a good idea needs to be permanently banned from ever doing music production work ever again (wait, didn't A7X produce this?). It's not just a little vocoder either, Shadows' poor voice gets distorted and autotuned to all hell to the point where Rebecca Black starts sounding natural.
And then there's the true oddball of the album (no, they weren't done yet), "A Little Piece of Heaven," perhaps the most acclaimed song on the album many times, which is completely ironic considering it has practically nothing to do with the actual band. Unlike "Afterlife" where orchestration complemented the band, here they barely even complement the orchestra. It's alright I guess, with an Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Satan kinda quirky but evil sound that suits them well, with M. Shadows' vocals sounding equally as demented. But not only does the song drag for a seemingly endless 9 minutes, I have no idea how to classify this as an Avenged Sevenfold song either, because they hardly even made the song bar the vocals. It sounds entirely like a completely different band featuring Avenged Sevenfold, not something I'm sure I'd be high-fiving each other for.
And of course, this is all given the fact that you are one of the few who can stand M. Shadows' typical whiny, grating voice and semi-retarded lyrics to begin with. Indeed, this album is so lost for direction that you'll feel confused just listening to it. Just reading about it is probably enough to have you confused already. Sure it's experimental, which is typically commendable in today's cookie-cutter entertainment world, but not in a good way. Throwing things in a blender and hoping for the best is usually not the best way to go about experimenting, and while it doesn't fail every time, it certainly does most of the time. There are a few listenable tracks on here like Afterlife and Almost Easy (don't expect any masterpieces), but otherwise you'd only be hurting yourself.
