Black Veil Brides

Going into this album, I had high expectations that legendary rock producer Bob Rock would work wonders for this band. Before delving into this any further, I’m just going to specify that I am in fact a fan of this band’s work. I’m not a narrow minded follower who loves and adorns everything they’ve ever followed, but they do have a lot of enjoyable highlights from album to album. With this album, I was expecting Black Veil Brides to finally break out of the box they had put themselves in by sounding like a mixture of Avenged Sevenfold and Motley Crue and to finally find their definitive sound, but that doesn’t happen here at all. Instead of trying to develop a sound all their own, they just yet again have decided to go down the same old route of trying to sound like a mixture of their influences. It just comes off as unoriginal and sometimes it just doesn’t work. The majority of this record is filled with nearly cringe worthy moments where they just sound like a really good cover band, and I feel like for someone who has an ear for music, that’s not what they would want to hear. If I wanted to hear Motley Crue, Kiss, Misfits, etc. I would listen to those bands. When I go to listen to Black Veil Brides, I don’t expect to hear the most original band in the world, but I do expect some original initiative. But that just doesn’t happen hear at all. Nothing is cohesive, it just doesn’t flow well. The track listing was poorly arranged, to say the least. The flow of the album makes no sense whatsoever and neither do the lyrics. While I have my fair share of complaints about this album, I will say this: It spawned three of my all time favorite Black Veil Brides songs, which would be ”Heart of Fire”, ”Goodbye Agony”, and ”Walk Away”. These are three songs where the band really shines and shows what they are capable of. I wouldn’t recommend this album to anyone though, honestly. Even with these three redeemable tracks, the rest of the album is just all over the place ,with Andy’s vocals sounding very mono tone and one dimensional, the guitars being as predictable as ever, and it has it’s fair share of rip offs. At some point there’s a song on this record that sounds so much like St. Jimmy by Avenged Sevenfold that it’s not funny, and there’s another point where they go from sounding like Slipknot to sounding like a rip off of mid-80s Alice Cooper and it’s just not for me. This was a big let down. This could have been a great album, but it just ended up being more of the same. It’s heavier, but that’s about it. It’s very sloppy and I’ll leave it at that, and this is coming from a fan of the band.