Before I say anything else, can I just say that "Ruin", despite being one of the band's better songs, is a really shitty opening track? Man it just doesn't give off the feeling of an opening track. Sure it sets the tone for the album, but it starts off with its weakest riff, neither easing the listener into the experience nor smashing them in the face at full force. It just immediately smacks you with a really lazy and mediocre riff and that's just a terrible way to start things off, even if the song gets continually better as it goes, featuring one of their extremely rare (at the time) guitar solos and one of the fastest breakdowns in the genre. And hey, the "chorus" section is startlingly catchy as well. Keep an eye out for that part and specifically the line "This is the resolution / The end of all progress". Put a pin in those nine words, they're going to be very important later.
Anyway, As the Palaces Burn is Lamb of God's second album, and is very clearly the album where they found their niche. I love New American Gospel, but I'd never pinpoint it as a starting point for somebody who wants to understand what the band is all about. Their debut is a mess of sloppy noise that accidentally coalesced into a devastating monument to modern brutality, but it was As the Palaces Burn where everything truly came into form. This is the album where the Pantera-isms came to the forefront, where their own distinctive riffing style blossomed, where the songwriting started becoming more "normal" and less of a winding stream of consciousness, where Randy's vocals took on that deeper register they're most known for, it all truly started here. What makes this special as opposed to "just another Lamb of God album" isn't necessarily that it all started here, it's that it's just unrefined enough to still sound like a young band coming into their own. There's a sort of charm to that.
I struggle to explain exactly what I mean when I mention their distinctive riffing style, simply because I'm not a guitar player and I don't understand music theory beyond the most basic idea of what an accidental is, but there's a very specific key or scale that they seem to always use. It's very prevalent in the opening riff to "11th Hour". In fact, almost the entire remainder of their career is foreshadowed in "11th Hour". Anybody who understands what the fuck a diminished phyrgian locrian hullabaloobian scale means, please tell me what the fuck it is that Lamb of God is always playing in. They seem to have a very specific scale that is instantly recognizable but I lack the technical term for it and it's been driving me crazy for decades.
One of the most notable flaws of the band that truly begins here, that will (spoilers) absolutely become their achilles heel in the future, is that they very quickly morphed into a "hit single" type band. That manic consistency of the debut is wholly gone here. I don't know exactly how calculated it is, but from here on out it becomes very clear that each album will have two or three excellent standouts and then a bunch of filler. As the Palaces Burn tends to fare a bit better than some of their future works, but there's no denying that half of this album is a total bore, and those five meaningless tracks are all right in a row. "Ruin" opens the album on something of a whimper but it picks up a hell of a lot of kinetic energy, establishes their talent for hooks, and culminates with an absolutely devastating breakdown that seems to fly past at 200+bpm. It's followed up by the title track and "Purified", two of their most underappreciated songs. The former is a total barnburner, wasting zero time with intros or buildup and opens with a hockey stick to the teeth, and "Purified" stands as their thrashiest song without a doubt (it even has a guest solo courtesy of Chris Poland). That verse riff still decimates me, and the intensity is maintained throughout. "11th Hour" is the worst of the good songs, but it's still solid enough. It's very much in line with what The Haunted was doing at the time, with a very meaty dose of Pantera-esque groove. Chris keeps the intensity high with his frantic drumming, but this is the track that knocks the tempo down a few pegs from the blistering triad at the start and it never really recovers. This is clearly meant to be a more atmospheric and melodic take on that pissed off early 2000s metalcore that they championed on the first few tracks, and while it never goes into the overtly theatrical shit that Killswitch Engage did, they're obviously doing something very different here. The track is saved from the weak chorus with the dumb *dweeuhnuh DWEAOWHNUH* guitar line by the back half which brings back some of that cataclsymic heaviness showcased in the back half of "Ruin".
Then the next five tracks happen. From "For Your Malice" to "Blood Junkie", you just get "11th Hour" five more times and it gets real tiring real fast. I've been a fan of this album for like fifteen years and I still can't differentiate any of those songs between each other. There's a reason the only tracks that get trotted out live are the first handful and the closer, because this entire middle stretch is just filler in its most cynical form. I can only imagine that the guys wrote "11th Hour" first and then decided that they really liked it, probably got a good reaction when they played it to friends or at shows before the album was done or something, and just figured it'd be safe to keep doing that song forever. Even the fast moments on "Boot Scraper" and such feel mid paced and sluggish, not even Adler's spastic drumming can keep them interesting as a whole (instead he's the only interesting component of them). I can say this is probably the first time the lyrics themselves are worth noting though. I haven't really brought them up before because they're kinda inconsequential and just an excuse for Randy to make crazy mouth sounds since he still wasn't really enunciating his words at this point, but in a desperate search to find anything cool about this stretch of boredom I did discover that "In Defense of Our Good Name" contains some weirdly icky shit about southern pride and how slavery was bad but we should probably stop holding it against the people who for some odd reason can't seem to let go of the Confederacy. Nah, I know you guys are from Virginia and all, but don't be proud of that particular part of your heritage. Keep singing about how humanity is shit and the church is a lie, leave the socially conscious lyrics elsewhere. You really suck at picking your targets apparently.
I did a quasi-track by track thing up there because it's really worth noting how quickly the album dips after the fourth track, but it's not a total split. I mentioned the closer up there for good reason. "Vigil" is, potentially, their best song throughout their discography. They (probably not coincidentally) closed their first two albums with their slowest tracks, showcasing riffs that landed on some middle ground between Sabbath and Obituary, and of the tracks that take this approach, "Vigil" is clearly the better one. The acoustic intro is a new thing for them, and it's capable of tearing the roof off any establishment once that monstrous doom riff (and yeah, it's a legitimately punishing doom riff instead of simply slower metalcore like they often are in the slower sections) smashes in. I'm sure you've probably noticed that I've been praising "the back half" of songs pretty often, and that's no accident. At this point in time, Lamb of God was very good at picking up steam as they went, with each new riff building upon a previous one until the resulting katamari steamrolled the listener with alarming lethality. "Vigil" becomes positively fucking feral in final two minutes, throwing back to the total chaos of New American Gospel.
There really wasn't a good place to put this other than as a tacked on addendum at the end here, but As the Palaces Burn has another glaring flaw apart from the five track stretch of mediocrity, and that's that the production is bafflingly terrible. Between this and Metallica, 2003 really must've just been the year of bewilderingly bad production jobs from people that absolutely should've known better. This was produced by Devin Townsend of all people, somebody who clearly knows how to make metal sound good, but for whatever reason, either at his behest or the band's, As the Palaces Burn sounds like a low quality secondhand dub. I can only assume what they were going for here was a sound that could be described as "raw", but man there's a really clear difference between the raw sound on New American Gospel where it was coupled with raw and unsifted songs, and the much more calculated and finely tuned riffwork here being completely butchered by talented people trying to make it sound shitty on purpose. This is one of the few modern metal albums where I really think it's worthwhile to just skip the original product and get the remastered version they released for the 10th anniversary, it's at least a thousand times better considering the tightness of the songs themselves.
At the end of the day, As the Palaces Burn is a mixed bag. It has some bona fide scorchers with tracks like "Purified" and "Ruin" and even some genuine outside-the-box creativity for the band in "Vigil". But the atrocious mix and at least five and a half songs of indisputable filler on a ten track album makes it a bit of a hard sell. It still ends with a positive score because the good tracks are definitely worth listening to (the good half of the album are all live staples for a reason) and it's noteworthy for being the album where Lamb of God truly started forging their own identity in the burgeoning metalcore scene, but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said it wasn't massively flawed.
RATING: 61%
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