BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE: Scream Aim Fire

Produced by Colin Richardson and Alec Cartio

Released: Today

It's getting hard to ignore Bullet For My Valentine with the push they're getting from Sony and the saturation coverage in the British music media. Even I was considered imporatnt enough to get an advance copy of this album more than a month ago so obviously no stones are being left unturned in getting this band as much publicity as possible. From the moment I first heard of them I got the impression without even needing to know what they sounded like that they would play exactly the sort of contrived commercial heavy rock that they do. Bullet For My Valentine has geared itself for as much worldwide success as possible with everything they do: rejecting an offer from Roadrunner to take up one with Sony (and who could blame them for that?), ditching their early nu-metal affectations for something more current, and making albums that are stupidly catchy but ludicrously predictable.

Scream Aim Fire is targeted directly at the teenage alternative market, a dangerously grey area where emo, pop-punk and melodic metal all pander to the same audience where moshability and the right level of angsty energy are the only prerequisites for acceptance. Bullet for My Valentine are right on the money in that respect, mixing all three of those styles but without really stamping themselves as any of them.

The band has long proclaimed its metal pretensions and the first two tracks go some way to establishing "metal" crudentials. Both the title track and "Eye of the Storm" draw easy comparisons to Trivium, but sounding almost exactly like a band that has itself been accused of being generic and derivative isn't necessarily a good thing. Nevertheless, it does show that Bullet For My Valentine has the chops to follow a metallic direction if they really wanted to.
Yet herein lies the problem, because the rest of the album shows a band that clearly can't decide in which direction its destiny lies. For all the metal riffs they throw together and for all of Michael Paget's metal-inspired soloing, at the very next turn it all comes off the rails in a confused effort to be everything to everyone.

With its nauseatingly twee title, "Hearts Burst Into Fire" is an emo-inflected pop-punk song not that far removed from something Simple Plan would do. "Deliver Us From Evil" sounds like it was left off the last My Chemical Romance album, although you can't fault it's catchiness. I was singing along to this bastard by the end of the second chorus. Elsewhere, tracks like "Waking the Demon" and "Disappear" don't know if they want to be metal or emo and end up in some kind of wasteland somewhere in between and "Take It Out On Me" is just a waste of six minutes. "Say Goodbye" is actually a half-decent attempt at a metal power ballad, but it's just too hard to get past Matthew Tuck's emo-style vocals. Everything has an infectious catchiness to it but there's very little to hold one's interest for very long. Some of these songs run for five minutes or more, which is simply far too long for tunes aimed at an attention-deficient audience.

Scream Aim Fire certainly isn't the aggressive metal album that Bullet For My Valentine promised it would be. It tries too hard to be safe and just ends up being confused and contrived as the band sacrifices substance and originality for style and predictability. Their desire to establish a serious metal following may be genuine, but to get there they need to start writing songs that are metal all the way through and Tuck has to stop using those irritating clean vocals. Even then, they may be already too late.

1. Scream Aim Fire


2. Eye of the Storm


3. Hearts Burst Into Fire


4. Waking the Demon


5. Disappear


6. Deliver Us From Evil


7. Take It Out on Me


8. Say Goodnight


9. End of Days


10. Last to Know


11. Forever and Always

Rating: 45%