Review Summary: It's your fucking nightmare.
We've all been there. It's past midnight, you're blackout drunk, and for some godforsaken reason, you're on Facebook. You get this idea for a post that's really profound. So you hammer away at your keyboard until this super deep and profound thought you had is published, and everyone can see it. Moments later, you drift off to sleep… and you wake up the next morning, with a pounding headache. You look at your phone to see a bunch of “bro are you ok?” messages. You check that post you made last night… and you find out you were really just projectile vomiting your anger about how much of a fucking bitch your last ex was and it's just a bunch of messy paragraphs ranting about your last breakup. Oh, and to top it all off, it's full of un-autocorrected spelling errors.
Why am I mentioning this? Because Avenged Sevenfold's recent EP,
STATICA, is basically the musical equivalent of such a post. True, Avenged Sevenfold haven't been consistent in years. It's been 3 years since they've released an album, and about 10 since they released a good one. But I don't think any of us were expecting… uh, whatever this was. The intro track “LIGHTS” really does set the miserable tone perfectly with M. Shadows drunk calling his ex through T-Pain's autotune machine, and things don't get better. Any semblance of there being any solid riffs is off-put by the autotune, and that's when there are any riffs at all- you can count pretty much all instances of guitar
in general on Maggie Simpson's fingers, any semblance of actual drums on a crab's claws, and… well, anything of any substance on Clancy Wiggum's invisible typewriter. But damn, bro…
that autotune. That goddamn, fucking autotune. I realize it's bad writing to keep repeating yourself about the same point over and over, but at this point, it's basically the vocal equivalent of the St. Anger snare, and the musical equivalent of Jar Jar Binks. It's a bad idea, but it's also clearly the only idea. And when it's your only idea, you cling to that motherfucker like it’s the last ticket out of that random town you decided to visit while on vacation in a touristy city, Whenever Shadows splooges his ultra-autotuned “Staaaaaatiiiiiccaaaaaaaa” on the title track, you can tell he thinks he's onto something.
I’ve seen speculation that the band have done this EP as the joke, and I certainly would hope that’s the case. But I don't see it. Sorry, no bueno. The attempts at pseudo-deep lyrics and repeats of “we all rejoice” proves that these aging metal dinosaurs are out of touch with what their audience wants. They see bands like Sleep Token dominating the conversation and think “oh cool, a metal band incorporating elements of hip hop into their djent sound” and think they can do it on principle. They see bands like The Strokes abusing the fuck out of autotune and now Matt Shadows is in a competition with Julian Casablancas to see who has the more inflated ego. That's right, I never thought it'd even enter my head that M. Shadows could lose a “being down to earth” contest to motherfucking Julian Casablancas, but here we are, folks.
