Bullet For My Valentine (Mean Street - February 2008)

This ran in the February 2008 issue of Mean Street.

Big Shots

Though Welsh metallers Bullet For My Valentine enjoyed success in their native stomping grounds — Kerrang! named them Best British Newcomer in 2005 while Metal Hammer voted them Best British Band the following year — the band’s initial touring across the Pond was no sweetheart deal.

Two years ago, B4MV was kicked off its opening act slot for Rob Zombie’s North American tour after frontman/guitarist Matthew Tuck grew frustrated with pricey T-shirt prices and a lack of sound checks and posted some negative comments about the headliner on his band’s message board. Fortunately, the group rebounded from this misstep and with a new album, Scream Aim Fire, and a new tour, the fourth annual Rockstar Taste of Chaos, the group is locked and loaded.

“We can’t wait,” Tuck declares. “It’s a perfect kind of first tour for our album campaign. There’s no pressure. It’s not really our tour. We’ll have a shorter set than our headline tour. It’s going to be with two amazing bands that we know personally. There’s no weirdness or breaking ice moments. It’s straight into everyone having a good time and rocking out.”

Rocking out is what the band’s been doing since its 2006 U.S. debut The Poison, which has sold nearly 350,000 copies in the U.S. alone. The new record takes the quartet’s technical guitar sound up a notch. The guitars are beefed up, but there’s also a focus on melodic overtones. Songs like “Eye of the Storm” feature lots of melodic thrash parts, while “Hearts Burst Into Fire” explores classic hard rock song structures.

B4MV released Scream Aim Fire’s titular track as a single prior to the record’s Jan. 29 release to give fans a preview. The song was written in a recording studio in London during some downtime, Tuck says.

“It’s one of those 10-minute songs,” he explains. “I was sitting down, jamming some riffs. When this one riff came up, it was one of those cool moments. Some songs take a year to take life. This one took 10 minutes. As soon as we wrote this, we rushed into the live room, showed everyone the basic structures and the parts. We thrashed out for an hour until we had the basic song. The next day we recorded it and what you hear is nothing really changed from the demo version.”

Tuck’s vocals on Scream Aim Fire sound stronger than ever. His melodic side shines through as well as his screaming. Unfortunately, throat problems he suffered while on tour in 2006 nearly cost him his ability to sing

It’s been in the last year [that] I’ve had all this sh*t with my throat,” he says. “I’ve been taking proper lessons. I’m so pissed off that I didn’t do it [before]. It’s all a learning process and a fresh year. We sound better than ever.”“It wasn’t a big operation,” Tuck adds. “It was a tonsillectomy. It was because I’m a singer. It took me a long time to get [my voice] back. We had a show in Nottingham at Rock City on New Year’s Eve. We were rehearsing for a few days before that. On December 29th, [my voice] came back. So, I’m in an amazing place mentally right now.”

On the web: bulletformyvalentine1.com