[TR24][OF] Avenged Sevenfold "Hail To The King" - 2013 (Hard Rock)

Avenged Sevenfold
The members of metalcore outfit Avenged Sevenfold (or A7X) were still attending high school in Huntington Beach, California, when they formed their band in 1999. Nevertheless, it didn't take long for M. Shadows (vocals), Zacky Vengeance (guitar), Synyster Gates (guitar), the Reverend (drums), and Johnny Christ (bass) to make an impression with their aggressive hybrid of metal, hard rock, and punk-pop. The band made its official debut in July 2001, releasing Sounding the Seventh Trumpet on the Goodlife label before moving to the Hopeless roster for 2003's Waking the Fallen. Warner Bros. took interest in the band's aggressive sound and issued its breakthrough release, City of Evil, in June 2005. The album reached number 30 on Billboard's Top 200, propelled in part by the Top Ten success of the single "Bat Country." The accompany music video was heavily rotated on MTV and Fuse, where live appearances also helped boost Avenged's growing profile, and the band ultimately won the Best New Artist Award (though they were hardly newcomers) at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards.

As demand for their music increased, Avenged Sevenfold canceled their tour dates for fall 2006 and set to work on a fourth studio album. Boasting a grittier sound than previous releases, the self-titled/self-produced disc appeared in October 2007, debuting at number four on the Billboard Top 200 and spinning off the radio single "Almost Easy." The album also fared well in England, where three songs cracked the Top Five of the U.K. rock charts, and Avenged Sevenfold helped support the release by touring North America on the Taste of Chaos tour. Released in September 2008, the CD/DVD package Live in the LBC and Diamonds in the Rough captured the band during a tour stop in Long Beach. In 2009 the band announced plans to begin work on its third studio release. That same year, drummer Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan passed away at the age of 28. In 2010 the band released Nightmare with replacement drummer Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater). In 2011, they recorded the song "Carry On" for the Call of Duty Arms: Black Ops II video game, before releasing 2013's Hail to the King, which featured new drummer Arin Ilejay of Confide.

Riffs and grooves

Avenged Sevenfold stormed to the top of the Billboard 200 album chart with their latest full-length disc, ‘Hail to the King.’ The rabid dedication of Avenged Sevenfold fans has shown itself once again, but not everyone is raising their voice to congratulate the hard rock / heavy metal act on their No. 1 album. In fact, Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn wrote a lengthy, highly critical and pretty amusing article on Avenged Sevenfold’s “blatant jackery” of material from other acts.

'Nobody gets as big as Avenged Sevenfold without making enemies. Already past eight million album sales, Southern California’s metal princelings are not yet in the Metallica or Limp Bizkit league, but have a strong claim to being the biggest American hard rock band of the 21st century. Commercial success has inevitably brought accusations of betraying their metalcore origins, careerism and bandwagon jumping. And it’s fair to say singer M. Shadow and cohorts have yet to find a unique voice while cherry-picking from nu-metal, thrash, hardcore, goth rock and even emo.

On their sixth album, A7X have elected to turn this into a strength, embracing a multiplicity of genres with confident swagger. Like their last release, 2010’s Nightmare, Hail To The King was produced by Mike Elizondo, the LA studio veteran whose track record includes Jay-Z, Eminem and Alanis Morissette. It has power, darkness and bucketloads of testosterone. But it also contains softer pop-metal numbers like Crimson Fire, the closest A7X have come to a power ballad. Old-school purists will hate it. Good.

While power-chord slammer Doing Time nods to their metalcore roots, pumped-up aggression anthem This Means War is one of many tracks leaning into Metallica territory. The title track/lead-off single is purpose-built for adrenalised arena crowds, its melodic thrash slathered in speedfreak guitar solos and a percussive war-chant refrain. Meanwhile, Shepherd Of Fire combines devil-horned metal with heavy grind, tolling bells, ominous doom chords and a Faustian lyric: ‘I can promise you paradise, no need to serve on your knees.’

A couple of makeweights mar the album’s latter half, but quality control is high. The best numbers are the most bombastic, where A7X forget about appeasing genre snobs and really pile on the baroque’n’roll excess. The centrepiece is Requiem, which combines scary Latin chants, twisty riff arpeggios and horror-movie screams into a rock opera. The mighty Planets takes imminent intergalactic cataclysm as its theme, mashing dystopian sci-fi with a stomp- metal chorus bigger than the Death Star.

The apocalypse looms again in the climactic Acid Rain, an orchestral power ballad whose piano-driven arrangement and love-conquers-all lyric feels closer to Muse than any metal ancestry. Behind the macho bluster and armour-plated riffs, it seems Avenged Sevenfold are closet romantics at heart. Who knew?'

M. Shadows - vocals
Synyster Gates - lead guitar
Zacky Vengeance - rhythm guitar
Johnny Christ - bass
Arin Ilejay - drums