The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is one of the best albums of all time, and it’s centerpiece, “God Only Knows,” is practically sacred. However, as Avenged Sevenfold continue to roll out a continual batch of covers and new songs that weren’t on last year’s “The Stage,” they’ve done their own version of the song, perhaps emboldened by the fact that both bands are on Capitol Records. Their cover of the song is pretty faithful to the original, but gets a bit heavier after the chorus. The vocals are probably the weak point of the song, and they’re not bad at all until you compare them to the original Beach Boys. If you’re a new A7X fan that isn’t familiar with the original, you’ll probably be won over by this, and who knows, after the success of Disturbed’s cover of “The Sound of Silence,” maybe there’s an appetite for this. There’s definitely a lot worse stuff on rock radio these days, and Avenged have balls of steel for taking on a classic.
Here’s what M. Shadows says of the cover:
“Of all these new songs we’ve recorded, this one was the most difficult in terms of figuring out an arrangement. Figuring out the middle vocal melodies was also challenging. We wanted to make the song a little darker by adding a flanger and some haunting vocal nuances. The Beach Boys have always been an influence, so it was fun to tackle this one from arguably the best album of all time, ‘Pet Sounds.’”
Here’s the original, if you’ve been living under a rock your whole life:
https://youtu.be/AOMyS78o5YI
