After three albums, I think I have figured why I have been unable to fully embrace Bullet for My Valentine. They simply do not want to be the band I want them to be.

The band I want to hear is the one that made Scream Aim Fire (2008), a thrashy, classic-metal-influenced recording. This quartet from Wales would rather be the band that released The Poison (2006) and its hit single, “Tears Don’t Fall,” while being just heavy enough to make the cut for a tour like the Mayhem Festival.

Fever, Bullet for My Valentine’s third full-length album, has a lot of good moments. The opening trio of “Your Betrayal,” “Fever” and “The Last Fight” gets the record off to a great start. Things start to go downhill when the sensitive side emerges on “A Place Where You Belong” and even more on “Pleasure and Pain.” The latter sums up my frustration with the band. It begins with a killer thrash metal riff, then devolves with vocals too radio-friendly to fit the music and lyrics with zero imagination (“You don’t bring me pleasure/You just bring me pain”). Just when my spirits are at their lowest, here comes “Alone,” which throws keyboards into the mix and melds the band’s opposing sides better than any other song on the album. In the second half of the album, “Begging for Mercy,” which features the record’s most prominent harsh vocals, stands out the most.

That the band is not writing and recording exactly the kind of music I want to hear is my problem, not theirs or yours. They and you probably would just tell me to listen to someone better suited to my tastes. That is what I usually do, but I want to note that, overall, I do like Bullet for My Valentine (even this album gets mild thumbs up despite my criticisms) and maybe that’s why I’m hard on them.