Review by Rexorcist for Avenged Sevenfold - Sounding the Seventh Trumpet (2001)

I've been putting off these guys for forever and I don't know why.  Maybe it's because I'm not really into alternative metal or related genres like multiple.  Now I've always liked Bat Country ever since I heard it on SSX On Tour for Gamecube, and it was one of many songs I kept on the custom playlist with classics like Stand Up and Shout by Dio, Dynamite by Scorpions and Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden.  There were others, but I quickly associated myself with the song.

I understand that the band is a very flavorful one, and has reinvented themselves multiple times, even after just one or two albums.  As an Arctic Monkeys and Led Zeppelin fan, I have absolutely no problem with this.  In fact, from what I understand, these guys are supposed to have sucked as a metalcore band, so in my curiosity I'll likely get through all of their albums soon.  But despite the fact that I've put them off for far too long (Bilbo Baggins, 2001), the biggest reason I'm checking them out right now is so I can have an opinion on them.  This was likely influenced not only by my recent curiosity pertaining to their other songs and the knowledge of their diverse history, but out of a Reddit conversation involving the qualifications of a metal band on Metallum.  So I'm gonna check them out from the start.

The somewhat symphonic and cinematic intro is nice, but as soon as these guys dig right into the metalcore, they lose all sense of atmospheric building, and stem into a random and yet surprisingly predictable and tropy metalcore band.  I really did NOT like "Turn the Other Way."  Its lack of organization was so amateurish that it might as well have stemmed from a poorly-recorded black metal pre-debut album garage demo.  There are only slight improvements over the next two songs, with a welcome edition of the Bad Religion-style melodic skate sound making its way into a little bit of The Art of Subconscious Illusion with the unpredictability feeling a little more organized, almost like a metalcore variant of NoMeansNo, not that they hold a candle to NoMeansNo, who are probably the greatest hardcore band on Earth.  It even gets pretty creepy near the end, which I have to appreciate for a band who just named themselves Avenged Sevenfold at the time.  But immediately after, the album gets samey, and the tropes just take turns with no direction other than to display the popular tropes, which means the real reason the last track worked was simply because it was a better variant of an otherwise chaotic mess all restricting itself into one genre.

It gets to the point where the piano rock song Warmness of the Soul is a breath of fresh air as opposed to a sore thumb situation because its simple and catchy sound is like a pillow in comparison to the tiring metalcore tropes.  And the album practically stays that way until we get their attempt at a Stairway to Heaven of their own with it going into softer melodic territory before going back into edgy metalcore tropes.  This means that the album only proves that Avenged Sevenfold had not grapsed creativity yet and tried to take an easy way into metal fame.  Obviously, it didn't work out yet.