I always like to wait quite a bit before doing an album review. That is because sometimes it takes time to appreciate a specific piece of art. And for that reason, I would never consider doing a reaction review. If you would like to give an interpretation of something, your mind should be concentrated on receiving the message of the music. If you are talking and filming a video at the same time you are giving your two cents regarding a song… I think that would not be a sincere opinion honestly.
Yes, it has been a while since Avenged did not release a full-length. Too long. The hype was up in the sky after such a solid release like The Stage, and after having heard the band talking about this album since the beginning of the pandemic…
I had been given access to listening to the album a couple of days before. I was confused after that first listen. And I did not listen to it again until the release date, the 2nd of June. Again, after some listening, the album sounds strange. You would feel lost, especially in the last songs. You would think this is kinda a joke, where the band is sounding completely different. It sounds like a different band.
I got hooked on only the songs “We Love You” and “Mattel”. That is why I kept listening to the album because I wanted to listen to those songs. And all of a sudden, I’ve peeled the first couple of layers on each song and I really got hooked on them. These songs sound very simple, but they are not. After carefully listening to this album with the right equipment, trust me you would enjoy it just because of how it sounds. Music production-wise is mindblowing. This album was mixed by one of my favorite sound engineers, Andy Wallace.
What Andy does is mindblowing. If you look into his curriculum, you will find some interesting titles like Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill and Chocolate Starfish, Faith No More’s King For A Day (my favorite Faith No More Album), System Of A Down’s Toxicity, Gojira’s Fortitude, Ghost’t Impera… All these recordings have something, in particular, they sound immersive. Andy applies his magic. The location of each instrument and his movement is something that he does as no other mixer does. You can notice this in the first single of Life is But A Dream, Nobody. In this song, the drums toms are placed in a way that they set apart from the other instruments in a very sneaky way.
One of his most notorious contributions can be found in the opening song, Game Over with the in-your-face explosive piano appearance. With the elevating guitar played by Gates on Cosmic. Also in Cosmic, the piano kicks in creating a heavy transition. Quite honestly, the whole Cosmic song is full of cool sounds and transitions. Best song of the album for me. All these sounds are played by the band, I know. But how the sounds are presented, the position and movement are placed by Andy, and his job always sets him on top of the rest of the mixers in my opinion.
In terms of how the album was presented. All the art of this release was done by Wes Lang. Wes was not supposed to do these drawings for the band, but after hearing some demo tapes that M shadow delivered to him via voice messages, he was hooked and started to paint while listening to the music. In my opinion, you can tell that. After having digested the music, you can appreciate the art as well, it goes with the music for some strange reason. I think the album is presented in a very simplistic but cool way. Even if there is a lot of technology here involved, this album feels very human, just like the drawings are.
Comparing Life Is But a Dream with other A7X releases… well, it is quite different from all of them. I would say that this is their work where we find the most genres or styles. With that said, I do not like all those things. I don’t hate autotune, but sometimes I find it to sound fake. There is some autotune here that I am not a fan of. There are some other sounds that would prefer this album not to have. But this is normal to happen since they are experimenting across a lot of sounds.
Life Is But a Dream is an album where the music is in constant change. If you ever played in a band you know that there were those times when one of the lead players said: two rounds of this and then change to this part of the song. I feel that this album does not have those repetitions. A thing that makes it interesting on every listening. You will need to pay attention to what you are hearing because you might have missed something the last time!
This is the Avenged album that I disliked the most after the first listen, but now I appreciate what they have done. It has grown on me very well. It is too early to say that it is my favorite. But for now, it is the album I would like to listen to the most when I want to hear the Californian band. I always found a different approach, a different violin, and a different point of view after every single listen.