TNM Review: Black Veil Brides - Set The World On Fire. It sounds how it looks.

Brings a whole new meaning to the word "flaming", doesn't it?

So I've been advised several times not to even bother reviewing this album by many readers and personal friends alike. "You're just going to think it's shitty anyways, you're not going to surprise anyone." Shows what you know, ass clown. What if I told you I fucking loved this album? What if I told you that this was hands down the best album of 2011? What if I said to you that Black Veil Brides were bringing heavy metal music to a glorious dimension of epic majesty that I never before thought possible? You would probably figure out immediately that I was full of shit. This album is gayer than a Mustang drag race. If you don't wear striped fingerless gloves, you shouldn't be listening to this sort of music; and if you do wear striped fingerless gloves, fucking stop it.

So I'd like to point out the positive first, because there hardly is any of it: the guitar leads alone actually sound alright throughout this album, and this is coming from a guy who has some standard in his quality of metal guitar playing. He's certainly no Christian Müenzner at any rate, but Jake Pitts is a fair lead guitarist in his own right, knows his way around a solo, which is a lot more than I can say for bands of a similar camp. So I'll forfeit BVB at least that much. However, I feel the exact same way about the guitar players of Ratt, Poison, and Warrant, and that didn't make them any less homo-erotic or shitty. BVB is essentially glam rock back with a vengeance. Only it's worse this time. We got this group of young gentlemen (a title I struggle to grant them) with well-practiced, respectable metal playing chops, who instead of using their musical ability to make good music, use it to make horrendous crap specifically designed to seduce brain dead high school girls, and more importantly, the bottomless wallets of their frustrated parents. I don't even want to see what the dudes who listen to this look like. Probably a lot like the fruitcups that play it.

There is one very significant difference between BVB and the glam rockers that predate them, however, and I will gladly attack it with all my strength, as I see it as their most glaring weakness. Sebastian Bach, Vince Neil, Bret Michaels, and Bon Jovi, flamboyant lip-puckering douchebags though they may have been, were all good singers. They had something called a "range", knew their way around pitch, and had enough power in their lungs to make the back row of even the most enormous of arenas moist in the undercarriage. "Andy Six" is a piss-poor, abhorrent fucking rock singer. He's truly terrible, and the band will be much better off replacing his whiny, nasally, tone-deaf ass sooner rather than later. BVB got their start as a croon the chorus, scream the verse buttcore band as we've heard so many times before, and Andy Six had the "skills" necessary to carry himself through that sort of bullshit at that time. That is no longer the case.


Set The World On Fire makes it apparent that BVB are trying to make the transition from dismissable cookie-cutter screamo band all the way to money-making cookie cutter arena rock that will eventually be dismissable until it's back in style again. As unlistenable as the latter form of music may be, it actually requires someone who has a voice that can carry itself, and fill a stadium. It is painfully clear throughout the album, that Six relies on auto-tuning to fix his fucked pitch, and I don't mean it in that goofy Attack Attack! sort of way where they use auto-tuning as a sound effect. I mean in the here-and-there underhanded "let's fool people into thinking this guy is a good singer" sort of way. Essentially the air-brushing of record production, it does little to cover up the zits and boils of Six's non-existent vocal skill. He is restricted to this same exact, low, harsh, pop-punk level teenage tone that remains fairly consistent from when you start the album to when you have the decency to shut it the hell off.

So let me lay out for you what my afternoon has been like:

Yeah sure, I guess it was kind of like the movie Crow with extra helpings of Hot Topic.

The track "Legacy" is probably the most metalcore of what this album has to offer. Oddly enough, this means that it's the song I found the most to like about. In the sense that when you're in a prison camp being tortured, you greatly favor bamboo chutes under the nails time, as opposed to car battery to the testicles time. STWOF's typical fare teeters more towards cuddly mainstream, easy-to-digest rock radio friendly riffs that would appease the most modern day of numb-skulled Avenged Sevenfold groupies. "Fallen Angels" for instance, seems reminiscent to me of Motley Crue's modern day anthem, "Saints of Los Angeles", with perhaps a bit more pep in its step, and of course, lacking of all the attitude:

So I know this sucks. You read my site on a regular basis because you're smart as shit, so I'll assume you think it sucks too. Why bother calling out these wannabe douchebags when you can smell their bullshit from a mile away without my assistance? Because regardless of the brilliance of both you and I as true metal warriors, not everybody can. When you're standing on the outside of the metal world, and you don't know any better, you will call this sort of thing "metal", and you will associate this sort of thing with "metal". It hits too close for home for me, and it's not something I can stand for. If you gave a shit about the quality of your favorite genre, you wouldn't either. This is a snippet from a review of this exact album by Jon M. Gilbertson of JSOnline:

"Amid a windswept deluge of twin-guitar harmonies, kick-drum fusillades and headbanging drama, lead singer Andy Biersack distinguishes himself with a relatively calm vocal approach. But generally, Black Veil Brides hurls itself down a path paved with the bootprints of men who strode toward a heavy-metal Valhalla. "Set the World on Fire" is practically a tourist's guide to the place."

I present to you: your tour guides to Valhalla.

Every time I write a review of this nature, several people go on about "what's the point?" or "who actually considers this metal?" The thing that none of you understand, being the under-the-rock, pop-culturally retarded, stone-deaf heavy metal kvlt kids that you are (god speed), is that a lot of people consider this garbage "metal". Whether it be the people who listen to it, or the people who don't know what metal really is in the first place. I'm on a mission here to fix all that. So far it's been going pretty terribly.


But rest-assured: I am one tenacious mother fucker. 


- Brenocide \,,/

Reviews still to come: new TBDM, In Flames, Red Fang and more!