NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: Lamb of God - VII: Sturm und Drang

VII: Turd damning virus

As of now, this is the most current chapter in Lamb of God's ongoing story, and for once we actually have a fairly interesting story behind it.  The short version is that back in 2010, while in the Czech Republic, a 19 year old fan had jumped onstage, apparently something Randy Blythe was decidedly not cool with, and subsequently pushed him off the stage.  This fan unfortunately landed on his head and shortly thereafter found himself in a coma before eventually passing away.  Two years later, when the band returned to Prague on another tour, Randy was arrested for manslaughter.  After spending five weeks in prison, he was released on bail and allowed to return to the states.  Blythe is an international touring artist and needed to keep his name clear so he complied with everything he needed to, returning for his trial and eventually being found morally responsible since he's the one who tossed the guy off the stage, but ultimately not criminally liable since the promoter and venue didn't have adequate security.

So for once, there was some very real drama going on in the public light.  The entire future of the band was in limbo and their public face and founding member was facing a future behind bars for the death of a fan.  Once the dust had settled, the band had obviously undergone some serious trials in the public eye on a scale they had never experienced before.  This aggressive music has always (somewhat paradoxically to the outside observer, admittedly) been something of a safe haven and a place where people can be themselves without judgment, a place to release this pent up frustration in a healthy way, and now the performance of this cathartic release of negative directly resulted in the death of a fan.  That's actually a very morally and philosophically difficult thing to face, and one that should've led to some serious introspection and an interesting examination of what metal even is in the first place.  There should've been some tough questions to face.  Am I just a naturally dangerous person if I could (however accidentally) kill somebody who looked up to me?  Is what I do as harmless as I had always thought?  Am I blameless and this dead teenager really just a recipient of a stupid prize?  Can I really absolve myself of the blame for what happened?  What does this mean for the scene, the band, the fans, and myself?

What we got was Ashes of the Wake for a third time with one super boring Alice in Chains knockoff added in.

Don't get me wrong, there is indeed some introspection and remorse to be found in the lyrics of Sturm und Drang, because Randy is a human being with emotions and not a meatheaded dumbass like he may seem when in performance mode, but musically almost nothing at all has changed since the lazy trash of Resolution.  Almost all ten tracks here (with the notable exception of "Overlord") are just paint-by-numbers Lamb of God that might as well just be D-sides from their most popular album.  I'm sure I would've found this album to be boring as hell even without the manslaughter trial, but it's extra disappointing to see that the band just returned to business as usual when they finally had an external reason to break from their chains a bit.  If nothing else, if the band was going to continue after this, you think they'd be inspired.  But no, instead we once again get another lazy cash-in with startlingly few real ideas.

I'll just get the interesting parts out of the way first.  "Overlord" is a huge departure for the band, ostensibly being an Alice in Chains style grungy ballad rife with hitherto unseen clean vocals and massive heaps of melody.  The problem is that "Overlord" is much more of an interesting track than a good one.  This is really the only risk they bothered taking on Sturm und Drang, and every other slightly left of center idea like the brief talkbox guitar on "Erase This" and the vocal cameos of Chino Moreno (from Deftones) and Greg Puciato (from Dillinger Escape Plan) on "Embers" and "Torches" respectively come off as meaningless gimmicks.  Otherwise this is just the same as the previous album: Ashes of the Wake without the breakdowns.  I need to make it abundantly clear that Ashes was the worst album of the classic era and the breakdowns weren't the fucking problem, it was the intensely boring songs themselves.  If this was an album full of "Laid to Rest" level songs I wouldn't care at all, because that was the one song that truly worked on that album and laid the groundwork for how good the following two albums would be, but instead this is just "One Gun" and "Omerta" nine times but slightly faster and with "Rooster" randomly shoehorned in the middle.  If anything it's even more disappointing because some tracks start off really well, with "Delusion Pandemic" kicking the thrash up to the highest levels they've been in years before falling into the rut of mediocrity that plagues the album, and "Still Echoes" does the same except with some honest to god death metal influence instead.

There isn't really a good place to put this since the lyrics are just kind of not worth mentioning in the first place, but I'll do my due diligence and point out that "512" is the one track explicitly about his experience in prison, and lyrically it does finally touch on those questions of introspective guilt I asked in the preamble, and while the song itself is boring as shit and the vocal performance doesn't really relay any of the emotions in the words apart from the "My hands are painted red" in the outro, I do commend them for at least addressing the elephant in the room.  However, man am I the only one that finds "Footprints" to be in super bad taste?  Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but it really does feel tone deaf to have a generic song about kicking ass including lines about screaming "get the fuck out" to an unknown figure and defiantly asking "how did you think this would end?!" on an album directly following a high profile instance of you accidentally killing a guy for being in the wrong place while half of your knuckle dragging fans pinned all of the blame on the victim in the first place.  Randy is a very well spoken and intelligent person, but man he's got to be the dumbest smart guy on the planet.

(Also, another random aside, but has anybody else noticed that they frequently seem to reference feet in their song titles ("Footprints", "Foot to the Throat", "Boot Scraper") and every last one of those Footsongs ends up being meaningless filler?  I dunno, just something funny I noticed.)

Maybe I just want this to be something that it's not, and I mean duh, I want every bad album to be good instead, but Sturm und Drang is just a gargantuan disappointment.  Even with the context of the imprisonment and trial being stripped away, this is a clear filler album just put out as an excuse to hit the road again.  I feel like the band was constantly on the cusp of something truly exceptional here, because the good moments are genuinely promising, but they've really brought back their old problem of every song starting much better than it ends, except now the good parts only last for twenty seconds at the beginning of each song instead of at least managing a full two thirds of the runtime before getting dull.  Maybe their formula just doesn't work anymore, but I think the entire point of this series was to show how creative and willing to take risks they used to be (there's a reason I named the series after the debut, that title wound up being pretty prophetic with how influential they became) before just kicking their feet up and coasting on their established popularity.  They put the legwork in early and then just quit giving a shit, and albums like Sturm und Drang are the end result of that.  The new ideas used to form the entire identity of the albums themselves, now they're just superficial coats of paint slapped on to old ideas they seemingly have no intention of updating.

Maybe the new album that will inevitably be announced on the day this review is posted because I have awful timing will prove me wrong, but as of now, the band has been on autopilot for nearly a decade, and I'm just done caring.


RATING: 33%