There was a time in my life where I couldn't stand metal. I'm sure if I'd heard Lamb of God's newest disc, "Wrath," the rock-solid riffs and angsty white-boy lyrics would have encouraged me to give metal a second chance.
by Tom Minogue, staff writer
The album blazes an unexpected and more hard-lined edge than the band's previous record, 2006's "Sacrament." Cutting through the sludge of the previous album, "Wrath" stands out as a blueprint for melodic metal. Still present is the dichotomy of acoustic finger picking and thrash metal solos, but with a musical hook between the two, if not a lyrical one.
Despite my personal bias as a critic, there are aspects of the album that I can definitely appreciate in terms of the musicality of the entire venture: progressive changes in time signature, impossibly intricate guitar solos, extended sections of wailing on the double-bass of the drum kit. However, I just cannot get over how little the vocals of the album suit the sheer ambition of the music. The instrumentalists here are respectively the Wagners and Chopins of hardcore rock, so why would they have a singer who sounds like a mix between the Cookie Monster and Satan? Instead of accentuating the many strengths of the music that they're playing, it just makes the songs seem ridiculous. Aside from the tone of the voice, there's also the matter of the lyrical content, which works against the album's favor.
The most egregious offender here is "Everything or Nothing" in which the vocalist grunts, "Everything learned, forgotten and dead/Everything turns to nothing," a statement that probably could have come out of a middle school student's journal. Even worse is when the band attempts to communicate its moral misgivings about modern society. For all the intensity and soaring musicianship of "In Your Words," there's the opening line of "A sacred cash cow with sickly tits/Dripping temptation for hypocrites," which manages to completely undercut the best song on the record. Yes, the world is a bad place. Yes, everyone learned about end rhyme in middle school as well.
What Lamb of God lacks in thematic terms is ambiguity. I won't generalize this to the entirety of metal, but they're missing what contemporaries such as Shadows Fall have in spades -- that is, the willingness to engage the musical progression with a thematic one as well. If you can't take more than a simpleton viewpoint on these topics of life and death, war and peace, then what's the point of attempting to do so when the music can already do so without words?
This brings us back to that dichotomy of metal. The enjoyment of the genre is dependent on a listener's attitude toward killer riffs put through a nails-on-a-chalkboard filter. It's only when this tightrope walk is thrown off balance by an adolescent's perspective that the whole record comes undone.
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