I'm glad I'm finally on this Avenged Sevenfold kick.  I've put them off for years out of lack of interest for metalcore and alternative metal.  I was extremely eager to see where the band's mutation would take them, putting their crappy debut on exactly the same level (and directly above on my list of all albums I've heard ranked from best to worst) as The Unspoken King by Cryptopsy, and having been fairly satisfied with the increase in melodic and emotional focus on the second.  But now comes the monster of metal: City of Evil, one of the most controversially diverse albums in both genre-bending and online ratings.

The album kicks off with their iconic song, Beast and the Harlot.  I heard this song a couple times years ago out of curiosity, but I wasn't inspired to go into the whole album yet despite liking it.  But I had VERY little recollection of it, so the Judas Priest shift into thrashy power metal territory took me a little by surprise.  One guy on RYM said it sounds like something you'd hear from the Sonic 2 soundtrack.  Now I've played enough Sonic games to know what that means (not Sonic 2, though), but this is NOT Crush 40 here.  I'd rather sing along with "Her plagues will come all at once as her mourners watch her burn" than "I can feel your every rage, step aside I'll turn the page."  The difference here is THIS SONG IS NOT THROWN TOGETHER.  Although, the shift between thrashy metal and Helloween melodies feels a little out of place sometimes, despite being a lot of fun.

That was just for the first song.  Next is Burn It Down, which is more F-Zero-rooted than Sonic-rooted, and the thrash factor is pretty high.  You can tell these guys are Metallica fans, but it feels more like influence than straight out copying.  The melodic factor works beautifully with the singer's melodic vocals despite the high thrash factor.  It looks like they finally found the balance between melody and energy that they struggled with on the debut and improved on with Waking the Fallen.

There's a metalcore drum kick that starts Blinded in Chains.  Like a few songs from WtF (oh), it combines elements of melodic metalcore with power metal, but this was easily the best metalcore effort I had heard.  There's obvious vocal overlapping in the production, but the experience it creates is purely badass and never lets go of the melodic touches.  In fact, this song boasts some of their best melodies.  The song also has an out-of-whack and creepy fade-out segment which lasts about a minute and a half, but does a great job with the dramatic flair without ever overdoing it.  I guess this is another favorite AVS song of mine.  But no matter how hard I tried, I didn't get the Samson reference I was expected because of that obvious title.  Huh.

"He who makes a beast out of himself..."Here it comes, their potential magnum opus.  Melodically their best song so far, does an excellent job shifting from energetic metal to slow ballady alt-rock like it's nothing, and does an excellent job bringing standard hardcore punk into the alt-metal world.  On top of that, it's got an incredibly catchy guitar riff.  Even if it's not a very extreme one, it's an empowering one.  I've gotten aching arms and fingers doing air guitar to this.  Probably the best thing that ever came out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the movie was already good.

Trashed and Scattered blasted me into the "powercore" of the last album, but it wasn't so jarring as the shift between ballads and almost-deathcore like on WtF.  It felt so natural because the previous songs set a standard of diversity and aura that feels difficult to break.  Once again we get some extremely catchy rhythms.  Or maybe it's just me because I'm a power metal sucker, and I've been waiting for a band to really pull of the combination of metalcore and power metal.  This is what I expect.

Next, Seize the Day... OK, maybe I should've expected this, but a piano-rooted alt-rock ballad threw me off.  It didn't fuck with the vibe or anything, but it was a really pleasant surprise.  There's an easy comparison many have made to GNR, which may detract from the originality of the song itself, but at least it's a totally different singer.  Anyway, it's pretty cute and it's a welcome addition.  I think the vocal melodies outshine the instrumentation, though.

Sidewinder is next.  Here we have another energetic ballad that steers into some fairly progressive melodic territory.  It hits all the right notes for a proper alchemical reaction, balancing the rhythms, moods and hard rock / heavy metal vibes. The song goes on with this surprisingly soothing energy for two-thirds of the song before kicking into a Latin rock solo, never breaking the vibes.  That's pretty smart of them.  Not really overlong for seven minutes.

There's a welcome return to racecar metalcore and thrash metal with The Wicked End, featuring a wonkier lead riff with a little bit of djent attached.  But the song slowly mutates overtime, playing with varying levels of energy before somehow naturally working its way into a slow, symphonic chorus during the middle section and helping to overlap the third act until it kicks back into the thrash.  Is this the band's Stairway to Heaven?  Or is it just lacking focus?  No.  No way it's lacking focus.  It felt natural, and that's what makes it work.  The entire first album was loaded with metalcore tropes that didn't work together, so I'm going to approve this song and anyone can fight me on that if they want.  I'm a bit surprised this isn't the closer.  Maybe the album would be fine if it ended here, but I was gonna give the other three tracks a go and finish the album anyway.

The perfect way to start a song after that ambitious monster is with a slow pairing of acoustic guitar and violins recreating the wild west.  This is the beginning of Strength of the World.  Alright, after everything I've heard, I'll give them a spaghetti western beginning.  What does anyone have to lose?  It's not fucking with the flow.  After the minute-and-twenty-second intro, we get back into the electric guitars and build up into a thrash riff and goes into a fairly heavy and meaningful song that doesn't try very hard to go into more drama and relies on high-pitched guitars and the singer's voice to do all the work.  Personally, I think for nine minutes this should've had more focus, but it's not bad.  Besides, the song does mix it up again by bringing back the acoustic guitars and going into western ballad territory, and eventually into energetic riffs again and finally a cinematic violin outro.  It's another ambitious track, but it doesn't really have the same oomph or balance as The Wicked End.

The second-to-last track is Betrayed, and I feel like this one's a little melodically challenged.  The riffs and verses feel a little wonky and don't flow very well.  It's obvious they were trying a little too hard with this song, and that it was basically filler for a seventy-minute album.  Bad move, really.

This monolith ends with M.I.A.  It begins how I expect, with a softer intro before forcing itself back into energetic territory.  Thankfully, the band chose the right genre to go back to: metalcore, their roots.  But this time, the melodies work and the unpredictability is balanced. I mean, the melodies aren't amazing, but they drive this eight minute song from beginning to end and never loses its grip.

Alright, I'm extremely happy to say that I've given their iconic third album a spin.  And now to goad half the metal community into pointing their guns at me: I ate the majority of this album up.  It may be overly ambitious, but it's good to see they were trying a bunch of new things, despite the fact that the overambition leads the album to be frontloaded, especially due to the shorter lengths in the first half.  They seem to have largely forsaken metalcore, but they kept the personality traits and made something pretty fun.  This album might not always have the best songs, but it fits all of my standards for a good album.  The biggest reason I liked this album is that it handles genres and melodies exactly how I would if I were in a metal band (although I'd be heavier, and less reliant on epics).  Overall, great album by a band finding their ground, even if they have some toning down to do.

OK, nobody liked the Avenged Sevenfold debut album, and neither did I.  They say this one's pretty good for the fans, though, so I've got big hopes for this.  Finally getting around to these guys, I'm eagerly awaiting the moment I get to turn on City of Evil for the first time, but I don't want to do that until I get a really good idea of how the band evolved within the first three albums.

Like the first album, this starts out with a decent intro which gets up right into the darker vibes the band is going for.  Unholy Confessions felt dull, under-produced and dreary in its tropes.  It pains me that it became a music video.  But I found that Chapter Four was much more packed, keeping a consistent melodic vibe with its overlapping vocals and slight Gothic touch, and even had a lead riff vaguely reminiscent of the energy of my favorite franchise to compare metal songs to: F-Zero.  There's definitely a poppier thing going on here, but that's an improvement from the chaos of the debut album.  This definitely deserved to be the lead single for this album.  Remenissions starts out with the unspoken combo that I call "powercore," a genre I would totally kickstart if I were in a metal band.  Unfortunately, this is where it becomes clear that the band is steering too close to the "similar tempos" trope that many genres fall victim to.  I wasn't expecting the Latin acoustic segment, though.  Weirdly added, but somehow nice.  Desecration Through Reverence shows a bit more focus on mood-building and justifies the existence of the shifting tropes in a single song in the follow-up to their debut.  It feels so much more natural than everything the debut features.

I didn't expect many differences out of Side B, but I was hoping.  Turns out, my hopes were satisfied even for a little while.  As soon as this slower, alternative metalcore album with a deeper emotional vibe ends, the album steers RIGHT INTO POWER METAL like it was nothing.  This side ends with a basic combination of the temp tricks of the last two songs, and I can't really say this decision does anything for the album.  Despite the progressive nature and melodic prowess, it's a filler song.  Radiant Eclipse is slower, more alternative and rooted in traditional metal ballad behavior while maintaining the signature edge.  This six minute track really was a breath of fresh air that, unlike the pop rock track in the debut, Warmness of the Soul, which felt like a relief of fresh air from the crappy metalcore, is a perfectly fitting alternative song that completely continues the darker vibes of the album while building on previously established influences on this album to become its own thing.  Next was I Won't See You Tonight, Pt. 1.  One look at the length and I thought to myself, "What kind of song on a metalcore album like this lasts nine minutes!?"  My first thought was a fairly proggy ballad which probably builds on the gothic elements suggested by the secondary genre tag on this album's RYM page.  It gained a very slight heaviness from its standard ballad energy at the start, but it lasts that way throughout the whole nine minutes, so I only got about two thirds of it right.  It's really just an overlong ballad.

So now that that was over with, right back into the screechy metalcore like it's not a jarring difference.  This is Part 2.  They could've at least built into the conflict rather than making it instantaneous.  And of course, this song goes right into djenty weirdness to add another trope to the mix... although, this is the first song in this overlong album to do so, so I'm not too bothered by the trope.  Ironically, Clairvoyant Disease goes right back into alternative ballad territory, once again creating a jarring effect on the flow.  And finally, there's And All Things will End, which starts off with a riff similar to many Iced Earth songs, vaguely reminiscing thrash and power, but feeling right for the album here.  It's got much of the same drama as well, but the melodies are only decent and it doesn't hold a candle to any Iced Earth classics.

OK, I'm not gonna call this one of my favorite metalcore albums, but I'd say this album made AVS an easy band to LIKE, as opposed to an easy band to LOVE.  Their songs are poppy enough, maybe too poppy for metalcore and never displaying high points of creativity, but they try as much as they can with the genre they chose for themselves at the time and managed to keep things fairly entertaining with some sense of variety and a much better sense of emotion.

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.

When it comes to the “big four” of thrash metal, I’ve always been a huge fan of Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, yet, for reasons unexplainable, I’ve never been able to get into Slayer. 1986’s ‘Reign in Blood’ is often hailed as one of the all-time greatest metal albums, though, other than it’s absolutely killer opening and closing tracks, I find the record to be mindless drivel (ooh, controversial...).

Yet here we are; 1988’s ‘South of Heaven’, the album where the band infamously “slowed down”. Admittedly, the songs are a bit more polished here, and the riffs are more than just open-string chugging away. Although the album as a whole is still pretty repetitive, and doesn’t sound any different than anything the band have done before.

Still, I’ll give Slayer their due. ‘South of Heaven’ is better than anything they had released beforehand, and if vocalist Tom Ayara could somehow implement just a little bit of melody in his singing, they could really be onto something. Instead, as always, while the musicianship is of a high standard, I find the vocals tend to just sit on top of the riffs, without really fitting in too well.

If I had to pick any highlights out, I’d say the title track, as well as ‘Silent Scream’, ‘Live Undead’ and ‘Mandatory Suicide’ are all decent enough, and there’s ‘Behind the Crooked Cross’, which I instantly recognized due to its use in 8-bit midi glory in the video game ‘Doom’ (a game I played religiously in my childhood, years before I should have been allowed to). But as is always the case with Slayer, I’m just not that big a fan, and would much rather listen to any other member of the big four.

Formed by former Angra frontman Andre Matos, Shaman is another one of those typical power/progressive metal bands that are pretty unknown and only have small, cult followings to go by. I’d seen ‘Ritual’, their 2002 debut album, pop up on a number of websites such as Amazon and eBay, where it was being compared to prog metal pioneers Dream Theater, and while I was never under any illusion that they were as good or prominent, it just seemed like they were a bit of a cult band that had something special to offer.

Unfortunately they’re not really anything out of the ordinary when it comes to this kind of music.

That’s not to say they’re bad, in fact, ‘Ritual’ took quite a few listens to get used to, but it’s actually a pretty decent album. It’s not overly “progressive”, but is definitely a typical power metal record with fast, upbeat songs (with an almost “happy vibe”), incredible musicianship, and in fairness, Matos vocals are damn impressive too. The tracks are all well produced, and with solid songwriting that takes influences from Brazilian music, it’s an interesting enough debut, if not generic, but still pretty good none-the-less.

Tracks like ‘For Tomorrow’, ‘Distant Thunder’, ‘Time Will Come’, ‘Here I Am’ and the title track are all pretty good songs that are definitely worth a listen if you’re into this kind of thing. While most of them employ the usual traits of the genre, there are a few moments that do make Shaman stand out. ‘For Tomorrow’ has a very nice, tribal sound, with some interesting vocals and guitar work, while ‘Time Will Come’ has some very tasty, speed metal-inspired riffs.

Shaman aren’t anything particularly unique or innovative, and while it took a fair amount of time to get into, I’m glad I stuck it out, because ‘Ritual’ is a pretty solid debut that shows a band that certainly has potential to improve.