melon boy

rijreidjfe

Reviewe

difjgdoijgfdo

Black Veil Brides - Vale

Vale is Black Veil Brides’ first album in four years.

 That might not sound like a long time - but it’s the same period in which they issued their first three LPs. There was a good reason for this speed - their early output pretty much divided metal fans by age: if you were 13 and having a hard time at school in 2011 you may have loved them, a few years older and they probably made you feel a little nauseous. They took all the angsty self-seriousness of bands like Bullet For My Valentine to new extremes of insufferability, via 19-track concept albums about feeling like an outsider and an unadvisable dose of 80s hair metal.

For all the band once prided themselves on being so divisive, Vale reveals a deeper desire: to simply be a popular heavy metal band. The conceptual bells and whistles have been shed, leaving the typical Andy Biersack cliches to reach a point of vagueness that teeters on nonsensical at times (“The king is dead / in our town of broken dreams / The river’s red / are we breaking at the seams”). The music and production is as saccharin and lifeless as ever; a Frankenstein’s monster of classic metal tropes, decorated with the sort of toothless noodling that makes old Avenged Sevenfold records sound like bona-fide classics.

Vale is an LP that tacks on an orchestral reprisal of its second track to the end of its sixth, for no apparent reason, and still finishes as the groups least irritating effort to date. A slight improvement? Sure. Still worth the hate listen? Not even.