Avenged Sevenfold & The Problem Of Prog

Here's all you need to know about the new Avenged Sevenfold album: It's terrible.

I could break down exactly why, but you don't need a detailed treatise to get the point, and I don't need to waste any more of my time listening to that record. One sentence will suffice as a review, but there is something we need to talk about.

'Prog' has a problem.

The main takeaway I had from listening to the record is growing frustration with prog. The very foundation of how much of the prog I find myself exposed to not only leads to music I don't enjoy, but with music I fundamentally think is lazy. Let me explain.

There are two sides to the art of songwriting. One of them is to come up with compelling ideas, and the other it to turn them into compelling compositions. If you can only do one of those things, you're not going to reach the absolute heights as a songwriter. Prog, partly by its nature as being such a niche element in the music scene, doesn't require both of those things. That also explains why prog doesn't seem to ever be a growing genre.

Many of the songs on the new Avenged Sevenfold record are 'experimental', in the sense that they throw away the rules of traditional songwriting. That is a dangerous game to play, because those rules exist for a reason. If you are going to step outside the box and challenge listeners, there is no room for error. You have to deliver your absolute best ideas to keep the listener engaged enough to take the journey with you. Otherwise, you're only speaking to yourself.

What passes as experimental these days is to randomly throw divergent ideas together. I say 'randomly', because in cases like some of these Avenged Sevenfold songs, or like what Poppy did with her breakthrough, there is almost no songwriting put in place to explain why the styles are mashed together, or why the song moves from one sound to another. The entire idea of transitions gets lost amid the throng of ideas, and if you try to follow the through-line, you'll find it only exists in brief segments.

But this is not a new thing. My favorite prog musician is just as guilty of being a lazy songwriter. He regularly puts out prog 'epics' that stretch for half an hour at a time, but if we're being honest, they aren't songs. They're pastiche medleys of ideas being thrown together just to make something long. Look, I know it's hard to write a very long song. Having enough musical and lyrical ideas to sustain one concept through ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, requires a lot of work.

What doesn't require work is to take three or four shorter songs, stick them together, and then call it one big piece of work. If you have four sections to a song that not only don't share a musical theme, but don't share a lyrical theme either, then you don't have a cohesive song. The absolute worst was during one of the concept albums this guy made, which was supposedly one hour-long song, there was a section in the middle about his father. The album had nothing to do with that, before or after, so am I supposed to give this person artistic credit for not following his own plan for the album?

There is another aspect to prog with their insistence that time signatures and complexity are more important than doing anything memorable, which was brought to the extreme when Tool's entire promo cycle for "Fear Inoculum" centered on the songs being written in seven, but at last Tool writes songs. I don't like most of them, but they're putting in the work.

Avenged Sevenfold didn't, and a lot of other prog music doesn't either. When I hear music that doesn't try to make sense, that sounds like the musicians dumped their bag of riffs out and played whatever fell next to each other, I feel like I've wasted my time. I can't think of anything worse to say about music than that.

All that is a long-winded way of saying Avenged Sevenfold may just be the front-runner as the worst album of the year. It's the only one that has genuinely made me mad.