Bullet For My Valentine

There’s a scene in Max Brooks’ epic zombie book World War Z in which the US military begins a fightback against the undead. Firing at the dead with metronomic precision, their commanders choose to play music to summon the undead and spur on the troops. They go for Iron Maiden’s ‘The Trooper’, but they could have done better. BFMV’s sophomore LP ‘Scream Aim Fire’ might have pretensions about the current political climate but to us it sounds like the soundtrack to the zombie holocaust: the heartbreak of unloading a 12-gauge into your eldest child, rebuilding a ruined world one grain at a time and putting down millions of dead. That Bullet represent the palatable side of thrash shouldn’t be held against them, even if ‘Hearts Burst Into Fire’ is basically a Lostprophets song. Everything else here is Brit-metal gold.

Mike Sterry

8 out of 10