Bullet For My Valentine - Scream Aim Conquer. Ben Welch
EP dips in intensity for the first time. The metal influences are backgrounded a little here, with the song following more of a post-hardcore or even nu-metal template. Lyrically, there’s some respite from the tales of murder and mayhem, with Matt even indulging in a little tenacious optimism – ‘when you feel like shit, you gotta keep on pushing’. With that said, the band still can’t resist a brief but explosive passage of riffing as the curtain falls.
The band’s love of Pantera creeps its way into the muscular ‘No Control’, a raging paean to anger complete with gang vocals and a pummelling palm-muted riff tailor-made for slam dancing. And as if composed specifically to sum up the EP in miniature, ‘Just Another Star’ seems to contain everything that has come before it in a single track – it opens with a scything, urgent riff a la ‘Hand of Blood’, moves into a grooving, muted section that recalls the one in ‘No Control’, has an unexpectedly melodic chorus and even throws in a couple of throat-rending death-metal screams for good measure. It’s an eccentric and slightly schizophrenic burst of ideas that blasts past in just under three minutes but, as a demonstration of what the band were capable of, it’s undeniably thrilling.
The release of the EP caused an immediate and somewhat unexpected stir. Matt would later recall that seeing the CD in stores was a defining moment for him but he wasn’t oblivious to the fact that a real groundswell of support was building and that it was somewhat out of the ordinary for a band who had only released one EP. ‘We just captured that nation’s imagination at that time, and it snowballed across the planet. It was crazy,’ he later said to Scuzz TV.
The excitement around the band was such that they sold out London’s 1,000-capacity venue the Mean Fiddler (previously known as the Astoria 2) for their headline date on Valentine’s Day 2004. The band had been there just four months previously as main support for 36 Crazyfists, and Moose recalls being terrified before the Valentine’s Day show. Bullet hadn’t released enough songs to fill the forty-five minutes required of a headliner, so they had to bulk out the set with new material. They opened with ‘Her Voice Resides’. The audience, not having heard a note of it before, went crazy anyway. They followed with three more new songs that would ultimately find their way onto the debut, including ‘Spit You Out’ and ‘10 Years Today’ and the fervour among the crowd was such that a frantic mosh pit broke out, with crowd surfers sailing over the barrier. By the time the band played ‘Cries in Vain’, the crowd’s singing was so loud that they almost drowned Matt out. The sense of a band teetering on the edge of a huge breakthrough was unavoidable and Tuck dutifully noted that the show felt like ‘a dream come true.’
It wasn’t until May 2005 that ‘4 Words (To Choke Upon)’ would be released, despite demos of the track having been available since 2004 (the demo features some slightly altered singing and guitar lines but is otherwise fairly true to the later studio version). But it must have felt sweet to finally get the song released, complete with an accompanying music video filmed at the Mean Fiddler show – the band had spent years in a dogfight of unsigned acts as Jeff Killed John and had their fair share of detractors to boot (Matt’s former manager in his day job at the record store springs to mind). But the song is about as plain spoken a ‘fuck you’ to the naysayers as there could be; ‘look at me now’ goes the refrain, a joyous declaration of triumph to all those that told the band they should give up on their hopes of success. Musically, ‘4 Words (To Choke Upon)’ is a maelstrom of squealing leads and furious drumming and, of course, comes complete with a huge, anthemic chorus. The video shows Bullet at their best, shot in a slick monochrome palette, with a throng of fans dutifully throwing the horns, crowd surfing and pressing to get closer to the band. It’s a telling document of the intense support the band were eliciting in even these early stages of their career. The release would just about sneak into the Top Forty in the last position – though it did top the UK rock chart, beginning a streak that continued for their next six singles.
The feeling of a growing wave of excitement was amplified even further when Metal Hammer announced the nominees for its annual Golden Gods awards on 20 April, with Bullet singled out in the category of Best British Band – a full five months before their debut album would come to be released.
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