"Camp finds success in certain passionate failures."
-Susan Sontag
Without a doubt, the most conflicting, disliked, successful, panned and acclaimed album of 2013 was
Hail to the King. Boasting song writing grounded firmly in that of simplicity and an emphasis on riffs and vocal hooks, taken on surface value Avenged Sevenfold released one of the most contemptibly unlikable albums of the decade. However, what many seem to look over is how simply overdone this album is- ignoring the terrible names, the childish lyrics and artwork, the main criticism appears to be the same line over and over again; “it’s bad”. Superficially, this is fairly banal and far from provocative. But it’s time to call a spade a spade;
nobody puts out anything like this and expects to be taken on face value alone.
But why is it people cannot see the satirical nature of
Hail to the King quite the way it was intended? Is it because they are not self-confessed purveyors of irony, and therefore do not have a right to parody, not unlike Japandroid’s
Celebration Rock? Or is it because this band aren't as in your face about their nature of satire, not unlike Steel Panther? There’s prejudgement that’s often given to a band of this nature that has to be forgiven, but with that said, deeper analysis of the bands roots and what intentions lay under the surface yield the message that is being ignored in this release.
Everything about Avenged Sevenfold that seems to be ignored in critical analysis is how creatively juvenile and rudimentary the band appear. Boasting some of the worst names ever to appear in music, the band themselves dress like bad SNL impressions of their heroes. Ever present remains the artwork, a significantly sardonic take on fantasy and mythological themes present in heavy metal. Live these guys jump off pyro spitting steps with the vigour of a child with his first Iron Maiden record. As is evident by the attention to detail and love for their craft, Avenged Sevenfold absolutely
adore classic rock and they make no bones about it. But they also understand there is something inherently
incorrect about it all. Allow me to explain.
Over and over again, time after time, Avenged Sevenfold make it drastically clear that this is satire of everything denim and leather up until the 21st century. “Shepard of Fire” mimics “Enter Sandman” in its entire fist pumping glory and James Hetfield-ian commanding style. “Doing Time” seems just as, if not more sleazy and daft than its source material (Guns N’ Roses’ “It’s So Easy”), while countless of times the band seem to go ahead and copy artists to a point beyond simply ‘influence’ (“Hail to the King” = AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”, “This Means War” = Metallica’s “Sad But True”, “Heretic” = Megadeth’s “Symphony of Destruction”). However the material is so blatantly derivative and lacking in creativity as so to satire these artists in themselves- regardless of mine or other opinions about classic rock and its counterparts, it can at times come with little regard to merit. As Thomas Love Peacock surpassed his romantically occupied peers by spoofing their rather embarrassingly self-pitying behaviour, so too does Avenged Sevenfold in mocking the generic components of the heavy metal song structure.
A case study can come in arguably the bands largest influence, Metallica. While Metallica are notorious for their dedicated and oft preposterously blind fanbase, it’s impossible to get over the purely unlikeable nature of their ‘middle-career’ records (
Load, ReLoad and
St. Anger)- Avenged Sevenfold keenly reflect those songs in “Requiem”. Mid-tempo and armed with a cumbersome riff, the band put forth satire of a band entering middle-age with brilliant effect, making sure the song drags on for too long for great effect, fully articulating illusions of grandeur and accompanying confusion. It’s unlikeable in similar sense to those Metallica records, but pushes how far image and name can take you when it comes to sales and critical assessment, with reception to “Requiem” being middling at best- unbearable similarities between this and “The Memory Remains” are also prevalent.
Similarly, the likes of “Crimson Day” embody everything wrong with the ‘80s power ballad by way of Guns N’ Roses’ “Don’t Cry”. Again, M. Shadows cries with preposterously shameful lyrics describing “A lifetime full of words to say/a hope that time will slow the passing day”. Of course, this is set to Synyster Gates’ having a complete guitar wank fest, sobbing over his fret board just as fast as his fingers deliver an unnecessarily frilly solo. Rather facetious song writing, a flippant attitude towards rock and roll- there’s nothing that could possibly be
serious about this. Targeting ‘that’ sort of fan who declares love for Guns N’ Roses but pure hate for their backwards pig of a frontman, again “Crimson Day” does away with the image and the pretence and provides it under the Avenged Sevenfold moniker to, again, poorly received results.
In this writers opinion, nothing
is serious about this. On earlier records, the band was notable for making an attempt to break away from the metalcore norm. The likes of
Walking the Fallen fused everything from twin guitar attacks to mixed clean/screamed vocals to gothic imagery and performance. On their self-titled they appeared to try and confound their fanbase by giving them what they wanted as much as they caught them blindsided. Now, they intend to break away from the stagnated metal scene by pointing a finger at it and laughing at its own inability to expand and evolve. In a strange turn of events, it becomes the bands subversive satire of the scene that comes to define it in itself. In a year with such releases as the similarly vapid
Vengeance Falls by Trivium, it seems evident that many are confusing satire for sincereness; make no mistakes, there is nothing about this that’s meant as it’s made to appear- it’s not irony, it’s an observation that when given further credence has strong substance to its message.
Not since Lostprophets’ overegging of emo culture on
Weapons has a band so brilliantly constructed a model caricature through the looking glass. Of course, M. Shadows is no James Hetfield, Synyster Gates is no Marty Friedman and Johnny Christ is certainly no Duff McKagan- what they are in fact are collated caricatures, reproducing the most shameful and arguably pleasurable aspects of guitar music in the last 40 years with a sly grin coming from the corner of their mouths. As Nigel Tufnel reasons in
This Is Spinal Tap, “males and rock and roll… it’s a sexual thing, innit?”, and if there ever were a better way to reason the ergo birth of
Hail to the King than that is the reason. No, rock and roll isn’t always clever; hell, it’s rarely ever
original, but delivered in primal doses of repressed fury and sexual aggression it gets the job done. Hardly any of the artists Avenged Sevenfold parody here were ever original and it clearly shows, merely the band challenge how far you can take unoriginality before it becomes difficult to distinguish the power of a live show from the artistic merit.
Evidently,
Hail to the King is the absolute limit.
