And here it is: Scream Aim Fire, the much anticipated sophomore album from Welsh thrashers Bullet For My Valentine. If you liked The Poison, Scream Aim Fire is going to push all your buttons.
If, however, you were one of those who accused Bullet For My Valentine of watering down the classic Bay Area thrash sound for the modern MTV market, you’ll find little here to undermine your argument – though it must be acknowledged that they’re bringing a whole lot of instrument skills and songwriting suss to the proceedings.
So you get frantic palm-muted chord work balanced with melodic solos and harmonic squeals, plus pacey tempos with plenty of snare abuse and double-kick action from the kit. Scream Aim Fire has the sound of the tape-trading era, yes; but updated and modernised considerably, not to mention delivered with glossy crystalline production that was out of reach to anyone other than multi-platinum pop stars in those days.
The sound is diluted and toned down from its roots, however. The melodies and solos on Scream Aim Fire are much more bright and chirpy, avoiding the aggressive and nasty lead sounds and deliberate discord of the thrash masters. And there’s a hefty slice of cheese running all through the album, with the sort of naked pop stylings that would have seen Metallica or their contemporaries lynched on stage at similar stages in their careers.
Listen to the hand-claps in “Eye Of The Storm”, for example, sounding somewhat incongruous as they come right before a blistering sixteen bar harmonised guitar solo; “Hearts Burst Into Fire” may be played with thrash instrumentation, but it’s pure 80s hair-rock anthem at the song-structure level; “Deliver Us From Evil” opens up with rhythms stolen wholesale from millennial punk-rock, and comes complete with a hardcore-style call-response chorus. Pure metal, this ain’t – but Bullet From My Valentine are careful to steal from the right sources to fill out their sound and their appeal.
The vocals on Scream Aim Fire – frequently harmonised, and sounding remarkably Californian for a former resident of Bridgend – also owe as much to pop-punk and emo as they do to heavy metal, and while there are some tunes that deal with the traditional thrash themes (the horrors of war, mankind’s rape of the planet, etc), I can’t help but be slightly disappointed by any band who play the “self-mutilation” and “I’m just born to die” cards in their lyrics. It just strikes me as a bit cynical; as no less a philosopher than Bart Simpson once said, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Even so, as clichéd as older and more cynical ears may find them, there’s no denying Bullet For My Valentine have the knack of writing hook-laden modern metal with an accessible pop edge that ticks all the right boxes for the band-names-on-schoolbags demographic. Those kids will hear Scream Aim Fire and name their first band after it, if they haven’t started one already.
No one else is going to lose any sleep over it, though.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Bullet For My Valentine, metal, metalcore, pop, Scream Aim Fire, thrash
