https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fM3ylFs3hs Now, for the more nostalgic "Metal hasn't been good since the 80's" among you, try and detach yourself from the steaming aura of vitriol that tends to follow Avenged around these days and just check out this riff. Not the intro piece that effortlessly sets up a much lighter side to the song, but instead the crunchy chorded version of the core progression that comes barrelling in after a few go-rounds of the first few notes - yes, it's a total monster. So much so that goddess-fronted hard rock high-rollers Halestorm would take a very similar riff all the way to arenas around the world with their hit 'Love Bites (But So Do I)' and Bullet For My Valentine would return to such hard-hitting notes for their career-saving single Raising Hell last year. Back to Avenged though, and the album that proved they were reaching for so much more than the metalcore crowd; 2005's City of Evil. It serves to their emerging dominance that the likes of Bat Country is a song that gets a more immediate reaction thanks to M Shadows' opening scream, or that The Wicked End's complexity runs circles around their contemporaries from that year, but on top of all of that it's Beast and the Harlot that commands a mass salute of devil-horns and a liberal voluntary dose of head-banging as soon as the chords start coming in.