Avenged Sevenfold
Last year Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan composed a piece called “Death”. Like a prediction. As if he said goodbye to his family, his band and the rest of the world.
“I hope it’s worth it / Here on the highway, yeah / I know you’ll find your own way-when I’m not with you,” he sings on the demo recording of the song that this has been renamed the “Fiction”.
Just two days later, on December 28, the drummer was found dead in his apartment in Huntington Beach, California. An unfortunate combination of alcohol, painkillers and an enlarged heart had taken his life, just 28 years young.
For obvious reasons, “Nightmare” is therefore, an extremely dark album. Mourning band mate, whose pieces have been recreated blow by blow of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy, are drawn into between each riff and harmony, and makes it sometimes really painful to hear. Especially when it has from the beginning was conceived as a concept works around racism, a crazy economy and religion downsides are now in place has turned into an hour-long memory trade show over a lost friend and super talented.
Musically the band’s fifth full length album is also the natural terminus of the innovative process that began with before last album “City of Evil”. It is still possible to trace influences from Metallica (the early ballad thinking has inspired “Buried Alive”), Pantera, Queensryche, and Guns N ‘Roses, but most of all, this is the crowning of a great album trilogy that Avenged Sevenfold could call their own .
And thus it is particularly tragic that “The Rev” never got to experience this triumph.