Review Summary: Trying to please people who wouldn't have accepted you is frivolous; this album is proof.
Scream Aim Fire is tricky. While this may contain the most technically sound musicianship in Bullet for My Valentine’s polarizing career, something important was sacrificed to achieve that distinction. The band was concerned about their “metal” credibility around this time, as Matt Tuck had exposed when promoting
Fever. When he interviewed Ultimate Guitar in 2010, he claimed they were “trying to write songs to please other people like critics and journalists who were saying bad things about the band - that we weren't a real metal band, etc.” This led to a noticeable drop in passion in the writing and performances. In part due to the issues Tuck endured with his voice, he sounds uninspired here, especially in comparison to
The Poison. The layering done in post certainly doesn’t help. As a result, the album ended up being underwhelming.
Not everything is wrong with
Scream Aim Fire at first glance, though. The album starts off on a decent note; the title track provides a contrast from the slow buildup on their predecessor, as it asserts its dominance on the listener with its breakneck pace. The moments after are where the album starts to decline though, as “Eye of the Storm” is forgettable and poorly written. Both “Hearts Burst Into Fire” and “Waking the Demon” have some merit when viewed from the lens of nostalgia; the latter is a decent take on thrash metal from a metalcore band
not named Trivium, whereas the former is a cheesy love song with some pop-punk-y musicianship. “Deliver Us From Evil”, “Take It Out On Me”, “End of Days”, and “Forever and Always” could have benefited from either major cuts in length or more interesting writing to make them worth their time. “Say Goodnight” is a notable deep cut, as the band shifts from 5th gear down to 1st, offering a more dynamic experience. Despite being a full minute shorter than its predecessor, the album overstays its welcome due to the overwhelming volume of recurrent instrumental lines.
Despite trying to diversify their range of topics, the lyrics are among the band’s weakest. The chorus from “Deliver Us from Evil” becomes grating by the fifth or so time it’s repeated, “End of Days” has one of their worst hooks to date, and the repetition of “whoa-oh-oh” in “Forever and Always” can get on your nerves after a while. The title track’s depiction of a soldier’s mind during warfare is unfulfilling, the duality between compassion and vengeance in “Waking the Demon” can get confusing, and the tough-guy attitude on “Last to Know” isn’t far off from fitting perfectly in a Five Finger Death Punch song. I’m sure we all know that singer Matt Tuck’s lyrics have never been top-tier; often they are cliché and not quite that original. However, seeing as the only Bullet album with worse writing in this department is
Temper Temper, it’s obvious he can do better. His writing shines most when he’s in emotional turmoil, such as on
The Poison, Fever, and the seemingly polarizing
Gravity. On here, it sounds like he was forced to come up with something in 15 minutes, and his uncharismatic delivery doesn’t help matters in the slightest.
There’s no doubt that Bullet for My Valentine, for all their imperfections, do have talent. The virtuosic solos and aggressive, thrash metal-influenced riffs on this album are still some of their greatest on a purely technical level. However, in their attempts to assert their “metal” credibility, the rest of what made
The Poison iconic was lost in the process. The lyricism, despite the added diversity in themes, is far less focused than it could have been. The music, despite its clear increase in technicality, overstays its welcome thanks to its reliance on repetition. The intention of the record was to please metal elitists more than fans of the debut; in other words, they tried to allure listeners that were never going to accept them anyway. Their best option would have been to move in a more natural manner from
The Poison; not necessarily a carbon copy, but with similar motivations and an equal amount of drive. Such was not the case, as despite the existent potential for greatness, the content of
Scream Aim Fire lacks passion, in contrast to their debut,
Fever, and even their most recent release,
Gravity.
Highlights: “Scream Aim Fire”, “Waking the Demon”, and “Say Goodnight”.
