The line between popular and populist music can be easily blurred by half the bands one finds on So. Cal alternative stations, and certainly when it comes to the genre of heavy metal it is extremely difficult to tell on which side of the line Avenged Sevenfold falls.
Still, legitimacy was the last thing on the minds the fans gathered at their show at the Wiltern on Oct.28, a swarming mass of mostly teens and young adults handkerchiefed, tattooed and wearing lots and lots of black. They came to have a good and potentially bloody time, and the Huntington Beach hard rockers were more than ready and willing to oblige.
After opening acts Operator, The Confession and Black Tide gave the audience an already good long night of dark metal, Avenge Sevenfold hit the stage with material from their new self-titled album to be released the next day, and gave fans a dose of their new sound. The tickets for the show had sold out within hours, and within the next few days the band, led by front man M. Shadows, would climb the charts, with their self-titled album debuting at number four on the Billboard Charts, and opening to rave reviews from everyone except much of the die-hard metal scene, who claim the band has gotten even further away from their original sound, and have moved into the territory of “pop”.
After a dark, doom-like introduction the band, (M. Shadows, Zacky Vengeance, The Rev. Tholomew Plague, Synyster Gates and Johnny Christ) burst forth with the first single off their new album “Critical Acclaim”, achieving at the very least acclaim from the fans, before going into an eleven-song set that left seemingly no one wanting.
In many ways this is what defines the band, and the reason an argument could be made that they share a good amount, both philosophically and aesthetically (in theme, not appearance) with modern day popular hip-hop, more than they do with so called “pop” music. They could be looked on as this generations most “hip-hop” of metal groups, the reasons coming through at their show. Whereas many of their forefathers and peers in 
the metal scene have no-where near the name-recognition and publicity of Avenged Sevenfold, they cling tightly on to a sense of “street cred” for having never sold-out and gotten airplay on MTV. This is what escapes Avenged Sevenfold, what with the immense success of their videos and merchandising thanks to corporate institutions such as MTV, The Fuse Channel and Hot Topic brand stores. Herein is what they have in common with big name rappers like Jay-Z or Snoop Dog, two MC’s who are said to have thrown away their legitimacy when they started doing Heineken Commercials and starring in kid films.
Yet their shows sell out with fans unburdened by whether or not they’re sell-outs. They show up for one reason and one reason only: to dance to beat, to rap along to the lyrics. In the same spirit, the fans at the Avenged Sevenfold show came in droves, uninterested in whether or not the band’s exposure or popularity had taken away from their true “metal-ness”. And seemingly they like what they’ve heard so far, regardless of whether or not their last album was to catchy and less hard than the earlier efforts(2001’s Sounding The Seventh Trumpet and 2003’s Waking The Fallen), they showed up to thrash and mosh and scream along to “Beast & the Harlot” “Burn It down” and “I won’t see You Tonight”, which they played during the middle of their set.
This idea of a (somewhat) decadent good-time above all else, uninhibited and undisturbed by the pretense of legitimacy has done well for most rap artists, and seems to be working with Avenged Sevenfold. Yet their music is not so simple as to cement this as purely the case, and them purely as a nihilistically unimportant pop-metal act. Where they may stray into the territory of populist is in their ever-evolving sound, constantly turning out surprisingly new song structures, influenced by a wide array of well-
regarded and eclectic tastes.
The first reactions to their third album, 2005’s City Of Evil were at first overwhelmingly positive by fans, it wasn’t until some of the songs started getting (inarguably) played out on the radio and television, and their image taking more of a front-and-center stage did the backlash by “true-blue metal fans” begin. But upon revisiting the songs when played live, such as the wildly popular “Bat Country,” one is struck by the undeniably originality they conjure up with their mixture of old-school Maiden-meets-Queen-meets-Ennio Morricone. It was their finding this sound that put them over the top and turned them into such a success of the new generation of metal fans and so it was at the Wiltern that those same fans were again introduced to a new turn by the band, as they played songs off their not-even-released-yet new Self Titled effort. With it they’ve now moved even farther away from a traditional metal sound and into something more of a gritty yet open rock spectrum. It’s hard exactly to put a finger on what it is they are starting to sound like, but the audience seemed into the new stuff on display, as they played the new album’s tracks “Afterlife” and “Scream” during their set.
They all closed out the set with their previous biggest single “Seize the Day” then surprised everyone with closing the night out with Waking the Fallen’s “Unholy Confessions”, letting it be known that they haven’t forgotten their roots, and don’t intend on leaving them behind all-together.
And if the exuberance on display that night was any indication, the fans are ready to roll with their new sound regardless, then again with some of the fanaticism on display they probably follow M. Shadows and crew into the depths of hell (considering the type of music they’re into they’d probably dig it too). Either way the argument for them being more populist than pop was made that night, and so long as the continue to follow their muse into directions regardless of expectations and commercial potential they’ll be a band that will have to be taken seriously, no matter how many magazine covers they pose for, how flashy their video’s are, or how high they climb on the charts.
