Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Initial Impressions: Lamb of God: "Hit the Wall" Flexi-Disc from Decibel

Huh. I could not have described Lamb of God's present career any better than they did with that song title. Unless maybe it was "Treading Water" or "Splat". Lamb of God has been stuck in neutral for several years now. Once a promising groove metal band with the occasional thrash and metalcore influence, the band really has not done anything truly worthwhile since their move to big-time record label Epic for their 2006 release. Obviously the hyphenated words "sell-out" have been bandied about for awhile and probably with good reason.

"Hit the Wall" actually appeared on the Iron Man 2 soundtrack, apparently. I was under the impression that only AC/DC was on that soundtrack, which was enough reason to cause me to steer clear of it. Lamb of God is not much of a step in the right direction.

Enough of my bitching though, how is this thing? Well, it's pretty typical. That is to say, Pantera and Machine Head worshipping groove metal. Lamb of God have always tried to do some interesting things with their riffs, and the opening melody is somewhat entertaining, but it just devolves from there.

Randy Blythe is trying to alter his voice to try to sound like a badass, but he ends up affecting a vocal tone that sounds like the microphone is stuck in his mouth and he is trying to call for help.

So, yeah. More of the same from Lamb of God. Perhaps "Retired" should be the name of the next one.

2 comments:

  1. Nice. I actually haven't listened to anything from them since Ashes of the Wake, and it sounds like I'm not missing anything.

    One of the guys at Metalsucks said some really negative things about some band or other, and it must have appeared on their Facebook page. So, a whole bunch of their fans starting coming to that post and talking smack. One of the things that struck me was that someone said something which essentially meant, "All you trve folks only like Lamb of God." I found it incredibly weird how out of touch that insult was.

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  2. Ashes of the Wake was a good album, but everything since then has been pretty much the same.

    I like when people who don't know anything about true metal try to come up with insults. It's pretty amusing.

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