Becoming a fan of Avenged Sevenfold?

No, you read that correctly.

I am 55 years old and I’m suddenly a fan of the heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold. I am as surprised as you are, but this is the world we live in now.

To be honest, what I am is a fan of their brand-new, incredibly wide-ranging LP, Life Is But A Dream…

There are many things you should know about Life Is But a Dream…:

  1. It has divided its fans. Some love it, some love sections of it, and some DESPISE it.

  2. It’s not for everyone. It’s metal—fast and unrelenting at times—but it’s also a lot of OTHER things. Like ragtime piano and slow ballads and futuristic keyboards and a lot of things that aren’t usually on A7X LPs.

(By the way, that’s the shorthand for Avenged Sevenfold: A7X. I just learned it.)

To be honest, I did know Avenged Sevenfold before now. I am not really a modern metal fan—my interest in the metal genre dropped off after the heyday of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. But I did like “Bat Country” and I know that among metal bands, A7X is generally regarded as an intelligent, technically proficient group.

By the way, I have to thank music writer/vlogger Crash Thompson—his original tweet clued me in on the LP’s existence. That said, a more recent tweet reveals that he has a lot of issues with Life Is But A Dream—production, songwriting, lead singer M. Shadows’ voice… but that’s the fun of talking about music: Everyone has opinions.

I’ll say it like this—sometimes, our opinions of music change over time. For example, Tool’s Lateralus was hated by Pitchfork, but is considered a classic of the progressive metal genre now. Then again, it also proves that at times, I feel like Pitchfork is basically run by a bunch of doofuses. Again, opinions.

(Sometimes, however, hated albums remain hated for a reason.)

Hopefully, Life Is But a Dream … is in the classic-after-a-time category. But… it may remain a complete mess in many people’s opinions.

For me, the LP falls into the category of extremely interesting throughout—and that’s my top rule with anything: Don’t be boring. It opens with slow acoustic guitar in Game Over, then races into thrash, and ends in slow guitar again. Mattel is basically your A7X-classic song. It’s fast, it drives the point home, it’s incredibly good.

And then it goes into weird mode again. Nobody and We Love You both stay within bounds at points, but move outside the lines little by little… and then you get Cosmic, and this is when you start sliding full-on into weird.

But for me, it’s GOOD weird. It’s Faith No More territory, sometimes, or System of a Down turf at others, or even King Crimson at their loudest. Beautiful Morning returns to remind you that this IS A7X, after all, and then you get the trio of songs: G, (O)rdinary (which has been likened to Daft Punk) and (D)eath (a full-on ballad). And then you get a piano piece, Life Is But A Dream, which is a coda for the whole thing.

It’s one of those things that, to me, is completely surprising in a good way. Again, I may not be A7X demo. But… this LP is never dull, and is spurring me to check out the rest of the catalog. And in the end, that’s a good thing.

Jonathan Tully