This band was my high school band. There is a strong connection between me and BFMV. Their lyrics always like teenager-ish, always a break-up theme and no deep emotions but I loved them. They had catchy melodies and great riffs. They had great vocal lines, awesome transitions between clean and brutal/scream vocals. 'Had'. They had all this, before their newest record, "Gravity".
"Are we losing Bullet For My Valentine?", I said, after I heard their previous record "Venom". Venom had all the stuff that I mentioned above; vocal transitions, heavy riffs, etc. But, all of them was fake. It was like giving audience what they want. But that was not what band wants. I complained about Venom. After a while, I forget about Venom, totally. One thing that Gravity does right; it make me wanna listen Venom over and over again.
Okay, this is poppy metal . Or pop-metal. I don't know. It's something like that. They used synthesizer almost in every song. I'm not against that. But melodies are just falls flat. There is nothing special about techno things on this album. "Don't Need You" was the track that they released not long after Venom. Melodic riffs were gone, that was for sure. But vocals were pretty insane and song was little catchy. That was not a bad song. It was mediocre. It's painful that we faced the fact that Don't Need You is the best song on this album.
Actually, Don't Need You wasn't part of the new record. It was way before. So, let's take "Over It" as the first single of Gravity. BFMV is a common band between me and my sister. We listened BFMV together countless times. After I heard Over It, I went her room and said "Okay, BFMV is over. This is ther worst song. By far!". And after the album released, I regretted what I said before, again. Over It is one of the highlights of this album. Bad lyrics, simple transitions and simply no riff at all... You can headbang to it but after a while you would be over with this song.
After a while they released two more singles; "Piece of Me" and "Letting You Go". They promised that they will use complex rhythms. I believed that statement because after departure of founding drummer Moose, Matt Tuck brought his bandmate from AxeWound, Jason Bowld. He is a monster on drums! He is so strong that I wouldn't want to be his drum set. Bowld was my hope for this albums. In the end, we had weak and simple drum parts.
Gravity is like Matt Tuck's solo album. Mainstream one. Heavy pop or something like that, I don't even know that heavy pop is a thing or not. Michael Paget is a great lead guitar player. But I don't believe that he attended the recordings of Gravity. There are no single solo on this album. It's St. Anger issue all over again. What we get with Gravity is, "listen and forget" type of songs. Strong ones. Some of them you may forget while you listening to it. Can you enjoy Gravity? You can. I enjoyed a little. Melodic vocals are not that bad. Letting You Go has a enjoyable chorus. Title track is 'headbangable'. Also, song named "Crawling" released with deluxe edition. I strongly suggest you to check that one out. It's not old BFMV but we can take it as a consolation. Gravity full of fillers. That's a bitter truth. Songs like "Not Dead Yet", "Breaking Out" (another track that came with deluxe edition) and "Coma" is far away from creativeness. Talking about creativeness, 'Under Again's verse is a little bit rip off from Bring Me The Horizon's "Doomed".
You can give it a listen. Gravity is not about total bullshit. Sometimes you need a pointless headbang. You can put Gravity on and try some of its song. But you can also choose another album to headbang. A better one, maybe. I don't wanna believe that the band that recorded Gravity also recorded one of the best metalcore records in my opinion "The Poison". This is not BFMV.
