I am totally psyched for the upcoming A7X album! :D i've been listening to a lot more A7X nowadays, especially Sounding the Seventh Trumpet. personally, im hoping that they go back to their old metalcore style, cos im very sure that after a decade of honing their skills they will be able to produce an album that's just as hardcore yet much more polished than S7T. but i wouldnt mind either if they stick with their current unpredictable style, with awesomeness such as Afterlife and Scream. in any case, i have faith in The Rev's song-writing choices.
so i've been looking through a few A7X videos on youtube, especially the LBC concert videos (Afterlife and Second Heartbeat are my personal highlights of the concert :) ). and of course whenever you look up music on youtube, you also get music-haters, and the "AVENGED SEVENFOLD SUCKS!!!" videos came pouring in. i watched quite a few of them, and i got quite frustrated. but you have to understand that it wasnt the fact that people hate A7X that pissed me off; i am fully aware that music is an extremely subjective issue and that one man's meat is another man's poison (if you could forgive that hackneyed saying). rather, it was how these people were lording their opinions over everyone else as facts that seriously pissed me off.
one reason that i've seen quite a few times for hating A7X is that "they are the most non-metal metal band ever, therefore they suck!!!" one common factor out of all the videos that use this reason is that they like to start and end with snippets of extreme metal, which i presume is their idea of "real metal". what is "real metal"? it covers a myriad of subgenres, from the original metal to thrash to doom to progressive, and any of those genres can be considered metal. if you listen to some classic metal, you sure as hell wont find any of the blast beats and death growls characteristic of death metal. i'll agree that a band like that would be a horrible death metal band, but it does not make them any less of a metal band. the same goes with A7X; stop comparing them to extreme metal and declaring that they suck, cos they're not extreme metal to begin with.
and who says that only metal can sound good in the first place? even if i concede that A7X has softened since Waking The Fallen (and i don't) and have become more rock than metal, is it so hard to accept that they sound good anyway? are you so stuck up to believe that metal is the only genre that can sound good? using the same logic being applied here, i could very easily argue that Lady Gaga sucks, or Muse sucks, or Pavarotti sucks, because none of them are metal.
college day tomorrow, and i have VIP hosting duties. honestly i dont know why im even involved in this, seeing that most other hosts are research students, but oh well. i guess it's kind of a drag to have to sacrifice my saturday afternoon like this, but ms gao did make a good point when she said that we would want to have people cheering for us if we were to win awards next year.
and what better way to end than with an A7X song? here's one from their self-titled album, called Gunslinger. it's the perfect example of A7X not being metal, but still being awesome all the same:
