Black Veil Brides - Vale

I tried out Black Veil Brides a long while ago, sampling some song off their self-titled album, decided it wasn’t for me, and moved on with my life. God I wish I had stayed there.

I’ve made clear before that I have no default hatred for metal’s more mainstream subgenres and I went in with a blessing of a second chance and honestly no predisposition to hatred for the band and gave their brand new album, Vale, a listen, only to find not only what pushed me away from them three or four or however many years ago, but even more, and in such infuriating, lethal concentrations.

I’ll back up. Remember when so many people thought Nickelback was going to come through with some genuinely heavy album last year when Feed the Machine’s title track was released as a single, which ended up being a still-formulaic and boring chuggy outlier on an album of more of the same ol’ Nickelback. From the beginning, the song sucked, and the album still would have sucked even if it followed in its lead single’s footsteps as a result of being the same boring alt metal/rock formula plugged into more heavy instrumentation.

This overflowing, miniature dumpster of an album proves it because it’s so unbearably, passionlessly, cookie-cutter, I can link every song on here to other alternative metal songs, not necessarily even great songs, but songs I’d still rather sit through than these. It’s not just that the vocals sound so terrifyingly similar to Chad Kroeger’s that it actually feels like I’m making myself sit through a Nickleback album. It’s their copy-paste placement, all the instrumentation’s copy-paste placement all over the album on each soulless track. 

I don’t mean to beat the dead horse of shitting on Nickelback, but this album won’t let that similarity go unnoticed. I would be practically censoring myself by leaving them unmentioned as a comparison. But nevertheless, I’m not writing this to shit on Nickelback like everyone did when it was cool, and still does when they come up in conversation. This is about shitting on Black Veil Brides for this disgracefully phoned-in, focus-grouped, walking twelve-track radio rock cliché.

To start with the vocals, the non-present, small-range, practically computer animated, zero-effort vocals, they could practically be considered drone in some vast mental stretch just to give the album some artistic credibility for how same-y, how mindless, how cruise-control they are. They come with no real highs or lows, no bursts of extreme passion, no unique flair, no character at all. Andy Biersack is just moaning a melody on each tormentingly flavorless song on this heap of moldy bread.

I also can’t let the cheesy “whoa whoa”s on numerous songs go unmentioned for their low-level pandering and lazy attempt at a “big” sound.

With the instrumental backing, there are a few momentary flourishes of quick double-bass, fast picking, and guitar tricks flashy enough for those who don’t know better. But overall, nothing on here is memorable or even worth trying to remember. It’s all a giant mush of some heavy metal clichés, some piano-led ballad-y clichés, and a lot of old-ass alternative rock radio clichés. I can’t even imagine this sticking out well, if at all, in 2002.

I have to get it out of the way and talk first about the wannabe epic in the middle of the album, “Dead Man Walking (Overture II)”, which is just a shitty, generic Nickelback-esque metal song stretched out and littered with some unnecessary movements just for the sake of stretching it out to an “epic” song’s length. Newsflash guys, being long doesn’t make a song epic!

“My Vow” and “Wake Up“ are transparently half-hearted, pathetic grabs at “heavy” street cred with some legitimately heavy alt metal instrumentation, still as stale as a bag of month old chips and the rest of the album. “The Outsider” sounds somewhat more intentional and notable for it, but it only looks good because everything surrounding it is… so bad I don’t want to write out more synonymous phrases for utter shit.

“The Last One” is only under five minutes but even at that and being the first full song on the album, it feels so stretched thin and dragged out I don’t know how the band rehearsed it and listened over to it, if they did, without getting bored and realizing how sub-par it is.

“Our Destiny”, “The King of Pain”, “When They Call My Name”, “Throw the First Stone”, and “Ballad of the Lonely Hearts” aren’t even worth talking about beyond how much they all sound like they were literally written by a team of top 40 alt rock radio analysts for an easy cash grab at the very inattentive branch of those stations’ listeners.

And of course the closing ballad, “Vale (This Is Where It Ends)”, ends the album so predictably “soulfully” and cornier as a finisher than every corny moment combined from Dream Theater’s The Astonishing.

Thinking of last year’s worst listens, albums like the Prophets of Rage debut and Hollywood Undead’s fifth full-length were at least so bad I could laugh a little through the pain. I can’t even laugh at this. It’s so bland and unoriginal; I’ve already laughed at the shitty albums it derives from, it’s like trying to laugh at a homemade remake of The Room. All the silly charm is gone, leaving just the crappy foundation of a bad movie.

This album is only 46 minutes long but it was so excruciating it felt like a shift at work just constantly looking at the clock, sometimes out of boredom, most times out of a hope for the end to miraculously come sooner. This thing has actually drained me of trash-related metaphors so I’m actually going to go look in my garbage for something else to liken this album to. I’m back, from the amalgamated smell of rancid, raw chicken, soggy paper towels wet with room-temperature milk and canned tuna juice, used tea leaves and coffee grounds, and old, wet cat food that occupies my garbage can. And I would rather sit with my nose shoved inside that for 46 minutes than sit through these awful 46 minutes again. I understand now much more fully the immense hate this band gets. This was just absolutely terrible, if I scored albums, this would be a 0 on any scale imaginable. In fact, I’m calling it here, this is going to be the worst metal album of 2018, I can already feel it. I cannot realistically foresee any other notable metal band slated for an album release or rumored to release one this year possibly doing worse than what Black Veil Brides have done here.