This one should be interesting.
Avenged Sevenfold - Nobody
Oh man, I don't even know where to begin with this one. I've never been much of a fan of Avenged Sevenfold, but I liked some of their songs when they were first getting popular. If they sounded like this back then, I wouldn't even be able to say that much. This song is.... one of the worst things I've heard in a long time, and it isn't even for just one reason. There's so much wrong here I could probably write a whole column about this one song.
We'll start with the production. The song opens with this droning guitar riff, and it's saturated with this artificial distortion that doesn't sound cool, heavy, or pleasant. It's a grainy noise that right away puts me in a bad moon.
It moves on to the songwriting, which is non-existent. That droning riff goes on and on, and the build is both slow and pointless. There's never a hook or a melody to pay off how long the song makes us wait for anything at all to develop. They pull the rug out from under us, and I don't know how they could ever think this was the best way to introduce a new album. The rest can't possibly be worse than this, can it?
But the biggest problem are M Shadows' vocals. He was always an acquired taste as a singer, but his voice is gone. He sounds utterly shot, with a deeply uncomfortable croak and strain in place of what used to be his voice. Frankly, I'm shocked they recorded an album before they figured out what is wrong with him and tried to solve it. It reminds me so much of the last Meat Loaf album, which was more sad than anything, because you could hear the talent dying on the vine.
This song is so bad it's truly unbelievable.
Matchbox Twenty - Wild Dogs (Running In A Slow Dream)
I'll be honest; I didn't think another Matchbox Twenty album would ever be coming along. After the gap before the previous one, and it making no impact whatsoever, I figured Rob Thomas would be happy to continue on making music on his own, and playing nostalgia shows with the band in between. But here we are with a new album on the horizon, and I'm not sure how to process this. On the one hand, Matchbox Twenty was a huge deal to me while they were releasing their first three albums. On the other hand, I haven't been very interested in Rob's writing direction ever since.
This song is not making me feel nostalgic. It feels like a continuation of their last album, which I thought only had two or three good songs, or perhaps Rob's recent solo work. Again, that's not stuff I'm very fond of. All of the 'rock' they ever had in their sound is gone, with this sounding like middle-age pop. And I get it; that's who they are and the point in life they're at. It just isn't where I am, or what I want to hear. Matchbox Twenty, to me, wasn't a pop band, they were a band that happened to have pop hits. That isn't who they've been in almost twenty years, so I shouldn't be disappointed to not get a Wallflowers style return to form.
Rival Sons - Bird In The Hand
I don't hear what other people do when they say Rival Sons are the best rock band of the last twenty years. They're ok, but I've never heard much in their songwriting that does much for me. This new song might be the first time that changes. To my ears, this could be the strongest hook they've ever written, and the song sounds like a nice bridge between the past and the present. My only real issue is the fuzzy guitar tone. I don't quite know why so many bands obsessed with the past love fuzz, since fuzz always sounds softer than a guitar tone with more bite, as if a pillow was strapped across the front of the speaker. Still, improvement is worth noting, and Rival Sons have finally done something I enjoy.
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