Photo Credit: Kameron Pollock
California, Metalcore quintet Avenged Sevenfold has never been one to shy away from the dramatic. It’s evident even in their many morbid album covers and song titles (“Shepherd of Fire,” “Burn It Down”, “Beast and the Harlot”). On the band’s eighth studio album, Life Is But a Dream…, they really do turn the drama up to ten. It’s an untamed collection of songs, whose self-indulgence reflects a band entering their fourth decade.
Opener “Game Over” begins in genuinely surprising fashion – with a gentle arrangement of arpeggio’d, flamenco-style guitar playing. It suggests a band with a genuine interest in diverse styles and expanding their ambitions – a far cry from the complacency that so many bands experience at this point in their career. But it doesn’t take long before the band reverts to their usual modus operandi – a thrashing wall of guitars and drums that drown out all else and destroy subtlety.
It’s a shame because there’s a sense that the band has something genuinely valuable to say. Even if the fast-paced listing that condenses a lifetime into mere seconds fails to conjure the desired chaos (“Changes, hormones, high school, threesome // Roll call, study, license, freedom”), moments of confession prove affecting (“Days are fine and come on time // But years leave with nothing to find,” “It strikes me that I don’t belong here anymore…. Adieu, I never had the will anyway”). However, the track’s imposing sound ultimately distracts from an otherwise moving tale of suicide.
Life Is But a Dream… ultimately falls prey to the weakness that has historically dogged the band’s music – they still have not found a particularly novel take on their overcrowded genre. On their latest full-length, Avenged Sevenfold are particularly unashamed to wear their influences on their sleeves – something which draws unfortunately sharp focus to the moments where they fail to meet the standards set by the genre’s greatest. Despite Synyster Gates’ impressive, frenetic guitar shredding, M. Shadows’ tales of isolation, and Joe Barresi’s loud and compressed mixing, the album lacks the intensity of Metallica’s best work, the desperate sadness, and rage of Black Flag’s, or the terrifying chaos of modern greats like Chat Pile or Lingua Ignota. Meanwhile, Shadows’ voice, though impressive, never reaches the intense, soul-piercing heights exhibited by the likes of Mike Patton or Courtney Love.
Instead, the album most closely resembles a melodramatic and overlong rock opera – with a lot of big feelings expressed loudly and unsubtly. Such is evident on “Mattel” (seemingly named after the toy company), a muddled and unoriginal statement of consumption and consumerism, which labors its point (“Cue the breeze that sway the painted trees // Toy yellow birds upon the rooftops sing in chorus with the buzzing bees”).
More than ever, the band’s appeal rests on the guitar playing of Synyster Gates, who was rightfully crowned the 9th best metal guitarist by Guitar World in 2021. But there’s only so much one person can do to elevate their band’s music, especially when their talents are as mis-utilized as Gates’ are here. To elevate Life is But a Dream…’s dramatic stakes, the band relies heavily on loud-quiet dynamics that are at first compelling but exhausting and predictable by the LP’s end. Nowhere is this more evident than on the 6+ minute “We Love You,” which switches between the two sonic states so frequently and so jarringly that it loses any sense of novelty or surprise by its mid-point. For all of the album’s grandstanding and melodrama, this is still the sound of a band spinning their tires in the mud.
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