NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: Lamb of God - Wrath

V: hr... wat?

I remember when Wrath first dropped in 2009, I actually kind of hated it.  I thought the vocals were  a huge step down from the previous albums with the introduction of weird tuneless yelling in addition to the usually great roars and shrieks and thought most of the album just kinda flew in one ear and out the other.  Nowadays I only hate it because it broke my titling gimmick in this review series.

Yeah, Wrath is actually one hell of an unappreciated highlight in Lamb of God's oeuvre.  I'm gonna find myself paraphrasing MutantClannfear's review a lot because he really nails it, but to distill it down to one sentence: This is the most legitimately pissed off the band has potentially ever sounded and pretty much every song represents the most extreme edges of groove metal with fuckloads of unhinged intensity.  A common criticism of groove metal in general is that the groove riffs never feel earned, like they need to be used to break up fast sections instead of just grooving the whole time because then they lose their punch.  Discounting the fact that this argument kind of accidentally writes off 80% of doom metal wholesale, Lamb of God takes that criticism and smashes it against the wall by making the grooves themselves the fast parts of the album.  This motherfucker rarely slows down, and pretty much every second is crammed full of riffs, more riffs, a surprising amount of melody and solos considering the band we're talking about here, and a few more riffs for good measure.

I'm probably overselling it a bit, but that's because I feel like I have to overcompensate with this album for reasons I'll get to later, but at the same time I don't think I'm wrong about anything I've said in the preceding paragraph.  Tracks like "Set to Fail", "Contractor", and moments of "Dead Seeds" are absolutely fucking batshit in how fast they are (say what you will about Lamb of God, they were never a particularly "fast" band until this moment apart from a few scattered tracks).  "Choke Sermon" actually sounds like a fucking Megadeth song and if you're mentally raising your hand to tell me that's insane, I'd ask you to shove that hand back up the ass it came from.  I think I finally understand why people insisted on calling groove metal "half-thrash" for so many years, because it turns out that simply speeding it up by 50bpm turns it into fuckin' "Ashes in Your Mouth" and that's fucking rad.  This speed also lays to rest that criticism from before, because holy shit does Lamb of God earn the breakdowns and more mid-paced groove sections this time around.  This is exactly what groove metal is supposed to be, and it's good to know that Sacrament was on the right path by finally eschewing the last of the metalcore influences because they've pretty definitively proved that they know how to make straight up groove metal work here.

Wrath is also deceptively dynamic.  At the time I thought it felt kind of stilted, but now, especially after listening to their discography chronologically, the bits like the acoustic intro track, the gorgeous harmonized guitar solo on "Grace", the stuttery stereo-flipping breakdown of followed by the dissonantly atmospheric outro of "Reclamation", the damn near full on extreme metal of "Everything to Nothing", the bludgeoning beatdown in "Fake Messiah", just... everything sounds like the logical conclusion of the creativity they'd been toying with on the previous album.  There're a lot of different ideas here, and they all sound natural (as opposed to the focus-tested calculation of Ashes of the Wake).  Even those vocals on "In Your Words" that I hated ten years ago sound like a daring experiment more than a boneheaded bad idea this time around.

I just want to take a moment here to highlight precisely how awesome "Contractor" is.  This track got a lot of flak from the cliched "true metal" crowd on MA and such when it came out, and now that the dust has been settled for the better part of a decade, it's almost hilarious how badly everyone misjudged this track.  There were all sorts of criticisms thrown at it for the opening whoop-holler and the lyrics being dumbass bro-sturbation about blowing shit up.  But while everybody was busy scratching their heads and pretending not to know what it was about, they all seemed to completely overlook the fact that it was a pretty scathing condemnation of private military forces populated by maladjusted bullies who peaked in high school gleefully turning Iraqi children into paste.  Blackwater even gets fucking mentioned by name I mean holy shit how do you miss the point that hard?  Lamb of God has come a long way from defending the Confederate flag on As the Palaces Burn.  Beyond the lyrics, "Contractor" is one of the tightest and most well written tracks they've ever penned, running in three distinct movements: the opening salvo of aggression and pretty much non-stop machine gun riffing, the exceedingly slow middle section that crushes harder than Giles Corey, and punctuated by the final act of abrupt chaos led in by one of Randy's all time best screams.  Again, maybe it's just the Pantera fan in me, but "Contractor" is almost a beat-by-beat reimagining of "Strength Beyond Strength", aka The Best God Damned Song Pantera Ever Wrote.  If namedropping Pantera just turned you off, I don't know what to tell you.  Grow up, I guess.

As much as I obviously like Wrath, I'll freely admit it isn't perfect.  "Fake Messiah" and "Broken Hands" absolutely repeat way too much and tend to drag, and they'd pretty much instantly ruin the flow of the album if they weren't separated by the astoundingly good "Grace", and "Set to Fail" is really disappointing in starting off with blast beats and a shitload of aggression before morphing into a decent b-side from Ashes of the Wake.  But really these are just nitpicks.  In the grand scheme of things this is a pretty fucking excellent album.  Every single member (barring bassist John Campbell, who from day one has always been an almost hilariously inconsequential non-entity when it comes to their sound) is on top of their game and all but a few songs are total knockouts.  I love Wrath and you should too, this is everything that "open minded" metal fans claim groove metal should be.

I want to close by scratching an itch here, and that's that you might've noticed several reviews voicing bewilderment/curiosity at this album's comparatively low score on MA compared to everything else they'd done (it's been balanced somewhat over time but the reviews stay forever).  For those of you who weren't here ten years ago, you may have missed the total flogging that the "Contractor" single got, and almost every criticism against it was bad faith nonsense from people who had no intention of giving the thing a critical listen in the first place.  I don't like to flat out accuse my compatriots of acting in bad faith, but when every single review feels it important to point out the squeal in the intro and constantly refer to that first riff as "chugging" or "mallcore" or "just fast palm muted chugging punctuated by random powerchords" which is exactly what a thrash riff is by the way then I just can't help but hop on my soapbox and yell about the flagrant misrepresentation.  Hyper fast palm mutes have never in the history of metal been referred to as "chugging" until that moment, and it was entirely because Lamb of God used a shitload of chug riffs on the albums leading up to this one.  So yeah, between the review-bombing and the vocal hatred on the forums, it became a weird fad to rip on that track, and when the album dropped in full, a lot of that misrepresented vitriol just kinda carried over onto Wrath itself.  I get it, Lamb of God isn't for everybody, but if you're curious about this album and would rather read some reviews before listening for yourself, I feel confident in saying you should disregard everything up until like 2011 when shit finally blew over.


RATING: 87%