Following the surprise release of a new track earlier this month, Avenged Sevenfold decided to pull a Beyoncé and drop a new full length album with no announcement. The Stage is the band’s seventh full length album, and the first with drummer Brooks Wackerman. You can see the music video for the album’s title track here:
Going into reviewing The Stage, I was unsure how I’d feel about the record. Musically it seems like the album will have a similar sound to City Of Evil, which could be a good or bad thing. I’m hoping that Avenged Sevenfold will have taken those vibes and given them a more modern twist.
The record opens with the title track, which is a great way to begin the band’s concept album about artificial intelligence and the breakdown of society. If you didn’t get the meaning behind the lyrics immediately, watching the video for the track above will clear things up for you. This is followed by Paradigm: the chorus, guitar solos and complex drum fills of which make it obvious that this record has moved on from the more classic metal stylings of Hail To The King.
Even though the record is pulled together by M. Shadow’s signature vocals, Johnny Christ’s undulating bass and Zacky Vengeance’s backbone of guitar riffs, each track has its own influences from all sorts of musical areas. These additional touches are demonstrated by the addition of brass during Sunny Disposition, to the chugging opening riffs of God Damn, to the choral backing vocals during Higher.
There are a couple of ballads on this album, as is to be expected from Avenged Sevenfold. Angels is a grade A ballad, but the guitar solos starting at around two and a half minutes and again at around the four minute mark managed to sneak in and completely blow me away. The layering of vocals towards the end of the track give it an incredible, almost cinematic atmosphere.
The feel of The Stage is absolutely massive and theatrical, and in my opinion it’s 100 per cent what the band needed to put out following Hail To The King. If you’d asked me to guess what this album would sound like, I would not have come up with this in a million years. Another reason for this is that the drumming on Hail To The King was very classic and more simplistic to reflect the style of the album, however Brooks Wackerman’s drumming is much closer to The Rev’s than Arin Ilejay’s is, which makes the album fit much better into their discography than their previous album.
Avenged Sevenfold managed to keep details of the album under wraps very well, and that air of mystery really boosted the hype for this record when it dropped on Friday. Another reason for the hype is that The Stage is the band’s longest record to date, and includes their longest ever song, the epic Exist which runs for almost 16 minutes. You definitely get a lot of bang for your buck with this record.
To be honest, I don’t think Avenged Sevenfold will be making many new fans with this record. I think half of its charm is that it hails back so beautifully to City Of Evil, and even their self titled album and Waking The Fallen in some tracks, which shows that even though the band have grown massively over the years, they haven’t forgotten their past. This charm will be totally lost on new listeners. Plus, I think the band’s attitude, theatrical style and love for putting on a big performance definitely comes through much more on this record than they did on Hail To The King. I do think that existing fans will enjoy this record as much as I do, and I absolutely cannot wait to see some of these tracks performed live when I see Avenged Sevenfold play in Nottingham in January.
P.S. I didn’t mean for this review to sound so negative about Hail To The King: I do love that record, but I’m so much more excited about The Stage as I was for their previous album, and it’s difficult not to draw comparisons.
Highlights: Sunny Disposition, Creating God, Roman Sky
altrocklife 