A rose by any other name, eh? However acquainted one is with this Welsh band, the pseudo-poetic moniker deserves to be up there with emo merchants like From Autumn To Ashes, Taking Back Sunday and November Mourning. Okay, I made the last one up.
However emo they are not – in fact with their second album they’ve made sure there’s an excess of ‘metal’ in ‘metalcore’. They’ve never been ones to shy away from their Metallica influence but Scream, Aim, Fire uses Master Of Puppets as a direct template, from the double bass drum freakout hidden by a convoluted guitar solo as found in ‘Waking The Demon’, to the opening melodic mayhem of ‘Say Goodbye’. Sure, there’s death metal ‘singing’ by backing vocalist Michael Paget to differentiate the two, and closer ‘Forever And Always’ is more similar to Jimmy Eat World than they’d like to admit, but the Metallica overlap is prominent indeed.
It’s a move that’s not particularly novel (Trivium are arguably the overlords of the neo-metal movement) but BFMV are a band whose recorded offerings are only part of their appeal. Altogether, theirs is a successful formula – they’ve sold over 340,000 copies of their debut album, The Poison, in the States, played the heavyweight metal shows like Download and Taste Of Chaos, and are on the bill for this year’s prestigious Vans Warped Tour.
Essentially, the focus is their live shows and even this record confirms that – it’s a tight, polished product whose every chorus and chord change was created with thousands of imaginary fans in front of them. You can almost hear the crowd chant along during ‘Deliver Us From Evil’ with its fist-in-the-air refrain of ‘Let! Me! Go!’.
A solid, evocative record – but it won’t match their live shows. In a good way.