Avenged Sevenfold live!

Avenged Sevenfold
Congress Theatre, Chicago
Thursday, November 8, 2007

If it weren’t for Avenged Sevenfold actually being onstage performing Thursday night, the swarm of peppy, teenage girls and their have-you-seen-the-weight-room boyfriends could make you forget you were at a heavy metal show.

Click here for the Avenged Sevenfold photo gallery!

Maybe it’s their good looks, MTV popularity, or the fact they spent so many summers playing to Warped Tour crowds, but somehow Avenged Sevenfold have built the most unmetal following in all of metal, despite having all the ingredients of the genre’s greats. M. Shadows is a spotlight-hogging frontman with big-time pipes (he single-handedly made “I Won’t See You Tonight Part 1” one of the night’s best moments); Zacky Vengeance and Synyster Gates are a free-wheeling guitar tandem whose lead (Gates) is a throwback guitar hero (a letdown of A7X’s set was the omission of Gates’ solo shred portion, a highlight of previous concerts); and the rhythm section (bassist Johnny Christ and drummer The Rev) is a bulldozer complete with Tommy Lee-ish show-off skinsman.

The band’s music certainly doesn’t cater to teenyboppers, either. “Beast And The Harlot,” with its fretboard-torching guitars, was one of Sevenfold’s fastest, most unrelenting songs of the night, a Maiden-esque tribute to the power of a dual-guitar lineup. Yet ironically it was also one of the set’s biggest sing-alongs for the audience. That song comes from 2005’s City Of Evil, a classic metal-inspired album with song lengths that regularly stretch upwards of seven minutes, but the set’s other two entries from City, “Burn It Down” and “Bat Country,” are among the record’s shortest but still, at least in the case of “Burn It Down,” no less “metal.” Surprisingly, two of the three songs chosen from 2003’s Waking The Fallen were the six-plus-minute “Remenissions” and the nearly nine-minute “I Won’t See You Tonight.” The other was show-closer “Unholy Confessions” and not “Chapter Four,” arguably the band’s best song. Even “Critical Acclaim,” “Almost Easy,” “Scream,” and “Afterlife,” the songs played from the band’s tamer new self-titled record, are still heavy, intricate stuff, material most fans of Pantera, Judas Priest, or Megadeth would dig.

If the way the audience blankly stared at Black Tide (the night’s first band) as they galloped through a rip-roarin’ version of Metallica’s “Hit The Lights” was any indication, though, these weren’t Pantera, Priest, or Megadeth fans.

You can’t blame Avenged Sevenfold for that, but you can for choosing horrible opening bands. A7X are in the unique position to bring real-life heavy metal back to mainstream status and expose their audience to the genre’s best, but failed miserably (“We picked all these bands because we love their music,” Shadows said at one point) with The Confession and Operator. Watching shirtless Operator frontman Johnny Strong grab his dick and flip the bird for 30 minutes was surely what it was like to see Limp Bizkit live, and The Confession were a Kill Hannah take on metalcore. Even worse, The Confession generated three times the crowd excitement and participation as the teenage, Florida-based Black Tide, whose old-school thrashtastic set was unfairly ignored.

Maybe Hannah Montana should open the next leg of the tour.

– Trevor Fisher

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly