The big rock ballad can be a good thing-seriously; it’s a great sprawling canvas where a band can try ideas maybe too ambitious for a shorter space, the results sometimes being very memorable.
It should come as no surprise then that Avenged Sevenfold has tried repeatedly to get their take on the modern epic right, M.Shadows is a massive Guns n’ roses fan and it shows throughout their heavy work and here in their reflective material also.
This time however, it’s as though they are moving away from something they had within their grasp-one step backwards from the likes of ’Seize the day ’.
With ’Dear God’ the lyrics just don’t have weight-surely their was a better way of describing the emptiness and soul destroying nature of a life spent travelling 95% of day, and the remainder actually doing what it is you enjoy, than ’All the shops are closed’.
It’s these second-hand insights and light-weight delivery that stop the song achieving any kind of insight and reducing it to a future of being pushed out of the set as they will undoubtedly write better.
