Avenged Sevenfold

Avenged Sevenfold led the old school of Los Angeles' gothic rock into the new millennium.

After debuting with the EP Warmness on the Soul (Goodlife), they defined a multi-faceted aesthetic on the album Sounding the Seventh Trumpet (Goodlife, 2001), mostly bridging the gap between gothic rock and metal-core. Waking The Fallen (Hopeless, 2003), that included the anthemic Unholy Confessions, emphasized the melodic element without surrendering the power of imagination that made most songs equally brutal and unpredictable. Guns N' Roses, Iron Maiden and Queen coexisted on the same album and, even better, sounded like different views of the same monolith.

City Of Evil (Warner, 2005) further refined their fusion of emo, pop, goth-rock and metal-core, largely on the strength of a mature vision of their style. They now played knowing what/how they played, and what made them different. While less spontaneous, the sound was more personal.

Avenged Sevenfold (2007) was, on the other hand, a chaotic stylistic parade that yielded few keepers.

Avenged Sevenfold's drummer James "The Rev" Sullivan died in 2009 and was replaced by Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater on Nightmare (2010), an album that seemed to be improvised by a bunch of high-school kids. They sounded like a cover band on Hail to the King (2013), ripping off Metallica (This Means War), Iron Maiden (Coming Home), Led Zeppelin (Requiem), Pink Floyd (Acid Rain), and Guns' N Roses (Doing Time, Crimson Day). They veered towards orchestral prog-metal on the sprawling The Stage (2016), which includes some of their most awe-inspiring songs (God Damn, the eight-minute opener The Stage and especially the lengthy closer, Exist), next to the usual grunge and metal imitations (Angels and especially Creating God).

Coming after a seven-year hiatus, Life Is But a Dream (2023) is an odd beast, spanning so many genres in one album: Game Over and Nobody hark back to Queen's operatic rock, Cosmic is a (parodistic?) power-ballad, Easier evokes Pearl Jam's grunge, G is a Frank Zappa-esque ditty, the catchy (O)rdinary delves into autotuned synth-funk and (D)eath is an orchestral easy-listening dirge. Among all these unorthodox songs, the most unorthodox is We Love You, which is either a joke or a new low in their career.