6/15/2023 0 Comments Flame painter vs fumyTo be fair, you would too, if you’d lived the same few years as Shadows. These days they take the approach to “not sweat the small stuff” where possible, and while their new music was treated with absolute seriousness, they have a healthy outlook on life and their career. Shadows radiates just as much positive energy as his bandmate. Down the road from Syn, sat in his bright house with a scruffy mohawk-mullet and casual white T-shirt, M. And things haven’t slowed down since the band completed the album, either, with the guitarist having to “tie up loose ends” and make sure this breathtakingly ambitious material can properly be translated live (here’s an idea how that all works: not easily).īut they’re both stoked about where Avenged Sevenfold are at in 2023. “Over the course of five years, I probably averaged fucking bad sleep four or five days a week,” he chuckles. With freshly-blond hair and no less than four guitars resting beside him, when Syn catches up with Kerrang! from his Southern California home’s music room ahead of the album’s release, he giddily reveals that he’s “energised and fucking excited” but also unbelievably knackered from a particularly brutal creative undertaking. A group made up wholly of “strong personalities”, Avenged Sevenfold – completed by guitarist Zacky Vengeance, bassist Johnny Christ and drummer Brooks Wackerman – drove themselves to new extremes on Life Is But A Dream…, and have since come out the other side very much on the same page. In fact, Syn laughs, they’re even pretty “nice” about each other. Shadows and Synyster Gates (real names Matt Sanders and Brian Haner, Jr.) see eye-to-eye on just about everything with their band now. Having experienced “contentious” recording processes before, M. But we wanted to see how much we could fuck it up and not sound like 40-year-olds with 18-year-old tools!” I really feel like the songwriting is some of our best. I hadn’t thought about this ’til just now, but this is maybe our most kind of lullaby, approachable record. “And maybe what he meant was from a songwriting structure. “How those comments resonated with me is that this album is as bizarre and crazy and fucked-up as it gets from an arrangement and production standpoint,” Syn explains, proudly. Put this to Syn today, and he considers a different interpretation to his friend’s prior concerns. The album actually felt – god forbid – “normal”. Shadows turned to his bandmate and asked him: “Is it really that out-there?” For the singer, having lived with it for so long by that point, the impact had dulled somewhat. Before the Huntington Beach metal heroes’ years-in-the-making masterpiece was given the mixing treatment, the frontman found himself questioning if they had even gone far enough (if you’ve heard recent single We Love You, you’ll already know what a genuinely hilarious thought that is).ĭuring one such early listen while in the car with guitarist Synyster Gates, M. He hadn’t always been so certain, though. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is fucking rad.’” “I felt, for the first time, what someone might experience when they listen to it, and how it goes from progressive, Zappa-esque stuff to all of a sudden funk, Daft Punk to, like, Frank Sinatra and Wizard Of Oz. “It was shocking!” he recalls, rapidly tapping his palm over his chest, demonstrating this most visceral of reactions to his own band’s music. On the contrary, it hit him so hard that his heart began to pound. While the album title may suggest a semblance of serenity, the experience didn’t gently send Shadows into a slumber. It had just been freshly mixed by Andy Wallace, and the frontman was keen to hear how the songs that comprise Life Is But A Dream… would transition into one another in their final form – specifically the trio of G, (O)rdinary and (D)eath. Shadows was laying down ready to go to bed when he put on Avenged Sevenfold’s new record. Late one evening after a hard day’s work in the studio, M. It wasn’t the most relaxing night’s sleep.
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