Playing it too safe with singles: not always good Feb 17, 2008 12:09AM PST

at least, in my opinion, for Avenged Sevenfold.

I'm not a big fan of the band, and though I did enjoy "Bat Country" I can agree with the more hardcore metalheads that their by-the-numbers rock and goth Guns n' Roses imitation of a stage presence gets annoying.

This generic radio-friendly number didn't do much to change that opinion:



Granted, for something that formulaic it actually does its job pretty well, but plenty of underground acts do their jobs pretty well and have a lot more interesting work to do.

Then, having been told most of the songs on the album were plenty different I got curious and skeptically typed "Avenged Sevenfold" into youtube for something other than a Guitar Hero clip. That's when this oddball smacked me upside the head:



Warning: The video is INCREDIBLY fucked up.

There's so much crap going on in this song, I just can't help but love it. There's that Saturday morning toon horn section sound with violent lyrics somehow complementing their tone in a weird way instead of just offsetting them for that trite "violence set to kids' music" crap. Then it ramps into something a bit heavier but still with the toon sound and finally... well I'm a sucker for string sections.

But both the video and the song are so creative I find it hard to believe this came from a band whose entire existence appears to rely on the success of older acts. I don't know if I'll like the album, but I'm digging the direction taken by this song.

And yet I like Airbourne, a band that is essentially a cover band for another band (AC/DC) that in essence rewrote the same song a bunch of times. Huh.

For those of you not into metal, some new sounds I'm digging in other genres:







K so that last one's a cover but it's my favorite band and I like that banjo