31. Avenged Sevenfold - "Life Is But A Dream…"

It is bonkers how a commercial metal band as big as Avenged Sevenfold have managed to get away with producing something as overtly uncommercial as “Life is But a Dream….”. It is light years away from the previous material which was essentially slick reinterpretations of Metallica’s Black album.

This is a consciously inaccessible album that does everything in its power to make itself impenetrable. It refuses to contain anything that would even resemble a chant-alongable anthem and even when it falls back on something as conventional as versus and chorus, it inverts that by adding twinkly instrumentals. 

But there is a brilliance to its bonkers nature. It is a stunningly original album that blatantly ignores all the rules for Stadium-filling blockbusters and instead seeks to contradict all available conventions. This is an unrepentant act of career Harakiri and the Gaul and the determination of the band has to be applauded. 

The simple fact is, if this was an unknown act, we would be applauding this is a piece of art rock genius. However, as it has been produced by a band who are usually more vanilla than Mr Whippy, all we can do is stand around gawping at the wreckage. An astonishing album but more importantly an astonishingly defiant leap out of their comfort zone.