Bullet for My Valentine - Gravity

This is just a sad one for me. Bullet for My Valentine has held a special place in my heart despite their steady decline in quality over the last several years for the role they played in my getting into metal music early on, and I was glad to hear them a bit more reinvigorated and focused on what worked for their first albums once again in 2015 with Venom.

But with Gravity, all my greatest fears of this band with whom I have so many great memories (who I have seen put on a good live show too) fall fucking hard into the shitty trend of overproduced, poppy, alternative metal that so many of their contemporary metalcore figureheads have followed the pied piper Olli Sykes into.

On Venom, Bullet for My Valentine had the right idea in turning back to the sounds that they succeeded with in the late 2000’s after the lukewarm reception to Temper Temper, which makes this immediate turnaround three years later sting so much and feels so frustrating and unnecessary. Even though Temper Temper was an incompetent and writer’s block-riden experiment with mixing hard rock into their sound, it still had some good moments and didn’t leave as bitter of a taste in my mouth as this first record under their new label, Spinefarm, has.

As soon as it makes its intentions clear, Gravity becomes a predictable slop of modern alternative metal loaded with obnoxiously overblown pop production (and of course a few token metalcore-focused tracks to try to give the illusion that they’re not selling out).

The first four songs out of the gate just drip with this untastefully glossy production flair, full of “woahs”, echo-y drums, and such submersed and bafflingly poorly produced rock instrumentation under Matt Tuck’s lifelessly sung melodies. It’s hard to believe Matt is even trying to hide his apathy for these songs, which sound like Bullet for My Valentine had as little say in how many of them turned out as they do performative presence on the music. The album sounds so manufactured it’s like a boardroom of lawyers and record executives put it together. The title track even sounds like something Imagine Dragons would do during its first verse, a bad omen that summons a hard and fast “no” from me on that one. (And lo and behold, they apparently cover “Radioactive” on the Target exclusive bonus track version of the album, which I cannot bring myself to listen to.)

And then there’s the “slow song” of the bunch: “The Very Last Time”. With a cloudy, overdone beat with uninventive finger snaps and a chorus melody that barely even counts as a melody with such a rhythmically nonsensical vocal delivery, it’s probably the most annoying song on the album.

The midpoint of the album gets a little bit more familiar and slightly more gutsy. “Piece of Me” and “Under Again” (which makes me feel like I’m in Hot Topic shopping for a wallet chain to get my high school crush to notice me) bear the only semblances to anything that I would believe to have actually come from the band if I heard it four years ago, but they’re still tainted by many of the bad choices made during the first five tracks. Of course, the gaudy title track, which is quite a low point again for the album, shows up here right after these two songs, and “Coma” is just as lifeless as most of what precedes it on the album, not doing anything to salvage the album’s lost midway momentum.

I just randomly thought about how awkward it’s going to be putting these songs in their live setlists. Like imagine “Gravity” coming right after “Scream Aim Fire” or “4 Words (To Choke Upon)” and just the blatantly astounding difference in quality on display.

Anyway, the last two songs on the album are the lead single, “Don’t Need You”, and “Breathe Underwater”. The former picks up with some nu metal-esque riffing after the synthetic ambient intro and is the only really decently structured song that sounds like something that might have actually come from the band themselves and not an algorithm, featuring the only prominent growled vocal sections on the album. It’s a bit reminiscent of Fever, but still given a little too much shiny production treatment. Nevertheless, it’s the best moment on the album by far, which is saying a lot about what it’s surrounded by, because it’s pretty mediocre Bullet for My Valentine.

The closing track, “Breathe Underwater” tries to end the album on a moody note; an acoustic ballad tinged with synthetic strings that shows potential, but like every song on here is held back from any possible compositional boldness and snuffed out by from the control room, wherein producer Carl Brown and the Spinefarm executives seem to micromanage the song and the whole album into creative catastrophe.

It pains me to write such harsh criticism of this band I owe such gratitude toward, I was lightly tempted to put in the half-assed effort on this write-up the band did on the album. Almost everything I wrote about Black Veil Brides’ Vale, minus the eerie resemblance to Nickelback, could have been applied here. In fact, the very things I recently lambasted Asking Alexandria, Godsmack, Shinedown, Three Days Grace for, and the weakest parts of the new Underoath album for apply here: predictable radio-friendly structures, vague and shallow lyricism, and truly painfully bland songwriting that seems to link all these bands following this awful trend together.

I said it in my post about Godsmack’s new album, but it really applies to Bullet for My Valentine and the rest of this whole slew of recent albums that so aggressively pander to this trend of soulless radio rock and metal for numbers’ sake as well: I hope your fans are forgiving enough to stick around for the “comeback/back-to-our-roots” album that’s probably going to follow after this half-assed industry plug underdelivers on the charts. Bullet for My Valentine are just one of many to go down this dark road, but it will be interesting to see where all these bands end up in five years or so, or however long it takes for this trend to fall out of favor. I’m sure lots of them will just transform their sonic identities much like In Flames has for this current half of their career, but I’m sure there will also be plenty of bands backtracking to try to mend damages, especially the less successful bands and the ones who try to include at least one or a few “heavier” tracks to try to still appease and string along their more “hardcore-preferring” listeners. I imagine Bullet for My Valentine will likely be ending up in the latter of those groups, because I can’t even see these songs as being catchy enough to garner much radio or streaming playlist support to put them near on the charts to bands like Five Finger Death Punch or Asking Alexandria. Then again, I’m just as dumbfounded by how well those bands’ recent work has done on those charts. But those bands have also had massive support over the past half decade or so, much more than the dwindling attention Bullet for My Valentine has been getting recently, and I don’t think their legacy alone can carry them to the same heights. Ultimately, I think this move will probably backfire for the band. They’ve locked their eyes on the mainstream prize, taken their shot, but forgot to point away from their foot, which is now bleeding profusely and needs medical attention. The part of me that cherishes their earlier work and even parts of their newer stuff hopes that they can recover, but honestly, my hopes are much higher than my expectations, and this could very well be a fatal blow for them.