Life Is But a Dream...

shit…um…okay. I guess I’m reviewing this now.

Believe it or not, I used to be a big Avenged Sevenfold fan as a kid. Little angsty, suburban, still-trying-to-be-a-boy me loved the shit of out the band that dared to ask “what if Metallica was a little less good” (joking…….mostly). But yeah, I used to love them, and after revisiting them to prepare for their newest album, I can see why. Despite not being my thing anymore, they’re actually a pretty fun band, driven by high energy riffs, catchy melodies, harmonizing guitar leads, and of course the kick ass drum patterns from the late Jimmy Sullivan AKA The Rev. Their run from 2003 to 2010 saw them go from metalcore to heavy metal to hard rock to symphonic metal, and while they definitely weren’t always successful and were definitely not the best at what they did, I do think those records have a lot of charm and are mostly a fun time. If you want to turn your brain off and headbang to some 🤘HEAVY METAL🤘, you could do a lot worse than Avenged Sevenfold.

Around 2013 I started to fall out of love with them for a number of reasons. I was only exposed to radio rock and metal growing up, and once I got exposed to the larger world of what music had to offer, including within heavy music, bands like Avenged Sevenfold seemed less exciting and impressive. On top of that, at the same time I was moving away from this kind of sound, Avenged Sevenfold started making some of the most generic and derivative music of their career in the form of “Hail to the King”. Remember when I said “what if Metallica was a little less good” but as a joke? Well “Hail to the King” is them actually trying to be a less good version of Metallica. And failing (or succeeding?), because the songwriting was noticeably weaker than what the band had done before or the golden era of the band they were trying to cosplay as. It didn’t help that Arin Ilejay, who they brought in on drums for this album, was not up to par to the standard that The Rev and temporary replacement Mike Portnoy had set. On top of all of that, I just finally got old enough to realize how lame and goofy the band could often be, *unintentionally* so. I also was now old enough to realize how annoying and unlikeable a lot of the fanbase was. Like I don’t think you get it if you weren’t around during that time, if you think metalheads are close minded, gatekeeping elitists NOW, I can promise you they were at least ten times more insufferable back in 2013.

Their 2016 followup, “The Stage”, was much more interesting, as it saw the band journey into progressive metal, but I honestly think my enjoyment of it came more from the novelty of them doing something less commercial than it being that good - in hindsight, compared to other prog acts, it feels rather limp. Despite this, however, I was was actually kind of interested to for when they would drop something new, even looking forward to it. It’s been a long time since that album, and because of covid and as well as of how that album came and went due to it not being that commercial it feels even longer. Even if what they had up their sleeve wasn’t great, I was still planning on having a fun time listening to new music from a band I loved as a kid. And the way they talked about it sounded really cool - apparently this new album was greatly inspired by Kanye West of all people ~I wouldn’t admit that in 2023~ but still, it’s a pretty interesting place for this band especially to be pulling from musically. Needless to say, I came into “Life Is But a Dream…” in good spirits, not looking to review it since I’m working on other stuff that needs to get done first, but looking to have a fun hour and to have a good time.

no.

no.
no.
no.
.
.
.
.
.
.
no.

So, I’m going to be saying a lot about “Life Is But a Dream…” that will be really unkind, and that’s because the truth, or at least my truth, is just kind of inherently so. Again, I wasn’t expecting much, or anything that good to be honest. If this album was just mediocre or even bad I would have made a paragraph at most NO NUANCE REVIEW and left it at that. But this…this is genuinely one of the worst listens I’ve had all year. Maybe THE worst. We’ll see when we get to the end of the year, there’s still six whole months, and there’s that fucking Hardy album as well, that might beat it out…but yeah, it’s that bad.

I imagine that Avenged Sevenfold were trying to make something that expanded on the prog stuff they were doing on their last album and trying to make something more experimental, but it comes across as though the band just…forgot how songwriting works. Across the board, “Life Is But a Dream” is musically a clusterfuck. It’s clear that the five piece had a lot of ideas, sounds that they could cover, different directions songs could go, etc, but there’s no evidence that the band gave…ANY thought into whether or not it works or how they could do any of it better. I’m worried that I’m making it sound like the band was trying to do something avant-garde and they didn’t stick the landing. I need to emphasize that this isn’t avant-garde. Read it again. This isn’t avant-garde, these aren’t weird ideas, they’re fairly straightforward, normal ideas. It’s just that they’re so poorly executed and slapped together with little care or competence that your brain is trying to justify why professional industry veterans sound like one of the random shitty obscure bands Catatonicyouths would share. It’s like your friend showing you this new food recipe they made and it turns out it’s over cooked steak with skim milk. It’s not just the fact that they’re experimenting - I usually appreciate that more than anything especially from a commercial band - it’s that these songs on a basic foundational level don’t work. It’s beyond poorly realized experiments, it’s like the band forgot how to write a tune.

Take the lead single “Nobody”. I can see what they’re trying to do here, it’s clearly them doing their own take of a Yeezus era Kanye song, but the saw-synth layered guitar tracks sound gross, there’s too much empty space happening in the intro to the point that it sounds like it’s missing tracks, the live drums sound terrible, the electronic trap hi-hats are so fucking loud and poorly implemented I thought I turned on a Hardy song by accident, the layers of dual vocals, synths, strings, and guitar lead during the chorus is so busy and claustrophobic that it sounds like unintelligible musical mush, and M. Shadows’s vocals…we’ll get to M. Shadows’s vocals later. Then, there’s “We Love You”, which…what the fuck is going on here. There’s like four different songs just copy and pasted into the track that have fuck all to do with each other and don’t flow into each other at all, the intro has M. Shadows falsetto crooning a lullaby over hardcore punk drum beats, then it suddenly becomes a Nine Inch Nails industrial song from Shein, the first chorus is classic Avenged Sevenfold heavy metal fare except with an abysmal melody that makes no sense and a vocal performance that’s clearly seen better days (again, we’ll get to that), the second chorus is a 1/2 speed slowed down ambient space prog cut, then it just suddenly becomes a thrash metal song with one of Synyster Gates’s most uninspired solos, then it abruptly goes back to being a Nine Inch Nails songs except it’s speeding up this time, then it does the metal chorus one more time before tacking on a slowed down acoustic style outro. Like…who the fuck is this for? This isn’t just messy or clunky or poorly structured, this is musically inane. Jesus Christ, I feel like I’m listening to my local dinner theater’s overly confident and self indulgent rock opera the director made after trying psychedelic drugs for the first time. I wrote that line as a joke, by the way, before I started doing some more research and learned that they actually were inspired to make this after experimenting with a lot of DMT, which…actually, make this whole thing make sense. Yup, this is exactly what I imagine a bunch of forty year olds who sell NFT’s and are going through a DMT phase would think is cool.

And it’s musically inane throughout its entire runtime. “Life Is But a Dream…” is fifty minutes and some change, which is a little on the longer side but nothing crazy, but it feels SO much longer because they never get a handle on any musical idea or even just a catchy melody you would want to listen to more than once. Besides a tempo change and a synth solo, “Mattel” is a fairly standard heavy metal song for the band, but it sounds weirder than it actually is because they never land on a decent tune and the production is bad. That’s another thing, the mixing and production on this record is so god damn ugly, and not ugly in an edgy punk way, it’s ugly in a “we don’t know what we’re doing” way. Nothing’s leveled properly, the cymbals are often the loudest thing in the mix, M. Shadows is barely audible half of the time, the guitars sound dull, the drums sound like they were recorded in a closet on a single SM58, and I don’t believe for a second that anyone in that room had ever touched a synthesizer before in their life.

Besides “We Love You”, the back half is probably the weakest bunch of songs here. “Easier” is a lighters in the air stadium anthem which is getting derided for its use of vocoder online. I don’t think the vocoder is implemented very well, but everything else around it is so much worse. It shifts back and forth from this tacky heavy metal verse with M. Shadows sounding like he’s singing through an old phone, the solo sounds completely uninspired, going through every cliché a solo on a song in this vein can go through, the lasers during the solo sound cheap and are way too loud, and then the final chorus just feels like a wall of frequencies being slapped at me. And then we get the three track “GOD” suite, with the first part being a bad attempt at an old school prog rock track, the second part is straight up a Daft Punk ripoff - like really, no exaggeration, a literal Daft Punk ripoff, badly I might add (how the fuck you can ripoff a band whose gimmick is literally sounding like robots and YOU sound like the AI generated song I have no idea) - and then the final part is a classic soulful jazz song, which, I’d actually probably really enjoy hearing from the band.

You know, if it weren’t for M. Shadows’s voice.

I guess we finally have to talk about it. M. Shadows’s voice sounds like shit. There’s no way to sugar coat it, his vocals are just bad the entire time. Now, I actually don’t love the way he sings a lot of the time on Avenged Sevenfolds’s classic records, even post starting voice lessons - he has these vocal inflections that rub me the wrong way like when he mangled vowels when the melody goes lower or when he makes his voice nasaly - but there’s no denying that man could howl to the back of the arena back in the day. But you could have told me “Life Is But a Dream…” was made twenty five years after their last record instead of seven, because I just heard him turn into a croaking sixty five year old overnight. I cannot understate how bad his vocals are on this thing, Shadows sounds barely capable of singing notes he used to be able to kill with ease. Not even just the high notes, he sounds like he’s barely grasping low notes too. On top of that, all of his worst instincts I mentioned above are played up times ten, this sounds like someone doing an impression making fun of M. Shadows. His voice sounds weak and equally grating. If there are any good moments here, M. Shadows straight up ruins them just because of how bad he’s singing. He sounds like he’s singing with marshmallows in his mouth during the verses of “Game Over”, he sounds like he’s trying to work his way through a hangover on “Cosmic”, he sounds like he’s singing through a heart attack on “Mattel”, and all around it comes across like they recorded him on a day he had covid. Even the screams are terrible; I know for some people the distortion might do a good job of hiding the cracks, but you can really easily tell he’s just got no power in his diaphragm when he’s screaming. Hell, Synyster Gates sings a bit of a track here, and he doesn’t sound great by any means, but somehow he manages to outshine his own band’s lead singer. I’ll be honest, he sounded better on “Sounding the Seventh Trumpet” when he literally didn’t know how to sing, it’s THAT bad. I don’t know what happened in the past seven years, maybe he’s been slacking in practicing or hasn’t been treating his voice in healthy ways, but either way it’s lead to an hour long experience of M. Shadows sounding like he’s singing on his god damn death bed.

I’m worried that I might be giving the wrong impression that I don’t like “Life Is But a Dream…” because it’s trying to do new things for the band. I don’t want to sound like “one of THOSE” metalheads, part of the reason I stopped listening to the band was because I didn’t like how the fanbase was predominantly filled with “one of THOSE” metalheads. But as important as experimenting is, a good scientist knows when to go back into the lab when their experiment doesn’t work. That’s the problem with this record, it’s just that on a basic, fundamental level, the music does not work. I don’t know who this is for - this isn’t the classic Avenged Sevenfold that long times fans would want, but this is also isn’t good experimental music either. I get being pleasantly surprised if you’re someone who is swayed by having your expectations subverted, but if you’ve heard any of the inspirations that the band is pulling from, you’d know that they’re doing a bad job at it. Sure, I didn’t expect that they’d be pulling from Kanye West, System of a Down, Nine Inch Nails, and Daft Punk, that is pretty interesting…but why wouldn’t I just listen to those artists instead? Why would I choose to listen to Avenged Sevenfold TRY to sound like them without understanding what made those artists so beloved in the first place? And…I mean, does anybody really want them to be experimenting anyway? Like, I appreciate them doing it, but do I want it? It’s not like people were asking for this. And while I’m not into this kind of music anymore, there’s nothing wrong with just being a fun, 🤘HEAVY METAL🤘 band. This is a band whose bread and butter is making thrash metal and hard rock for people who don’t like thrash metal and hard rock. Them trying to experiment and go outside their comfort zone shows them for how out of their depth they are.

This is an album’s whose enjoyment lives and dies from being caught off guard that a band known for straight forward hard rock is doing anything else, and it’s a novelty that’s incredibly thin. The production, mixing, and audio engineering sounds ugly and amateur (fuck I can’t get over how much this album sounds like shit), there’s nothing resembling a good tune on here, the compositional choices are senseless for the sake of senselessness without giving any thought into how to make them work, and the guy whose literal job is to sing can’t fucking sing anymore. This is the perfect example of an album made looking through tunnel vision, when you’re so deep in the trenches of what you’ve been working on and what you’re trying to achieve for such a long time that you’re not able to see the full picture of what’s actually going on. It sounds like something your friend who just started making music would show you, and you tell them you like it because you don’t want to discourage them from trying something new that they’re passionate about, and it’s good that they’re finally doing something productive instead of trying to push NFT’s and being edgy about the military and the confederate flag, so “keep going dude, you’re doing great!” - except it’s from one of the biggest professional hard rock bands in the world. “Life Is But a Dream…” by Avenged Sevenfold sounds like no one in the room knew what they were doing, and they had no real friends to tell them that this was not ready to be released, and the result is an auditory trainwreck.