After Vektor's Terminal Redux I thought I had had all the sci-fi metal I could take this year. Luckily Angry Metal Guy's blurbs about the surprising quality of The Stage, both from a songwriting and a production side convinced me to give it a guarded listen. The last time I heard an Avenged Sevenfold song Guitar Hero was popular and Bush was still president, so I'm not what you could call a fan of the group and was honestly more than ready to hate this record. Right out of the gates with the title track, though, I was hooked on A7X's new spacey sound and have been listening to The Stage on repeat more than I could ever have imagined.
I'm not familiar with Avenged's catalog outside of their big hits ("Bat Country", "Almost Easy"), but I can't imagine the compositions on this album are anything worse than the best they've ever written. The opening salvo of "The Stage", "Paradigm", and "Sunny Disposition" alone is one of the most enjoyable three song runs I've experienced in some time and offer an excellent serving of high-quality melodic... prog-thrash-metalcore? Whatever genre this technically falls under, the playing is tight as a vacuum seal and groovy to a fault with guitarists Synyster Gates and Zacky Vengeance (I did not make those up) locking in with new blood drummer Brooks Wackerman perfectly. Besides the freshly progressive numbers on display there is a good deal of variety scattered throughout The Stage that keeps things from bogging down too hard: "Sunny Disposition"'s jeering brass horns, "Paradigm"'s high-speed blastbeat chorus, and my personal favorite "Creating God"'s Layne Staley-esque vocal melodies and grungy beat all contribute a piece of the puzzle alongside a couple of slower tracks: "Roman Sky" is reminiscent of King's X's "Pleiades" in subject matter and slower tempo while "Angels" is pretty full-on power ballad. Despite the technicality and lofty subject matter (AI, Simulation Theory, space exploration, post-humanism) song lengths are wonderfully succinct and largely in the five-six minute range and the lyrics are actually pretty damn interesting.
While The Stage isn't necessarily breaking any new ground in the progressive metal arena the high level of musicianship coupled with the band's known skill at crafting hugely catchy, accessible metal mesh excellently here on this album. It's not quite flawless and it does drag a bit towards the end (and M. Shadow's vocals are the definition of love-it-or-hate), but not many metal bands can convince Neil Degrasse Tyson to write and perform a unique piece of prose on their album - and if he thought it was worth doing, I think we all can agree that The Stage is worth a listen.
C+
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