Lamb Of God: Wrath | Solid Record, But Not Life Altering.

Lamb Of God’s 6th studio album (to include Burn The Priest) is set to release in a week. It’s got a lot of people excited and actually leaked a couple of weeks ago. Some people have had mixed thoughts on it and I’m one of those people. I’ve only been a Lamb Of God fan for about a year and a half now. It took me some time to get in to them and once I did I was hooked. Now I’m wondering if I’m outgrowing Lamb Of God or if I expected too much. I honestly don’t know what I expected from Wrath besides a good record. We get a good record, but it’s almost passable to me at times.  Maybe it’s because of all the other metal that I’ve gotten in to in the past year or so, I don’t know. Maybe I need to give it more time because I like it, but I can’t say that I absolutely love it.

They said it was going to be more raw than Sacrament and they were right. It goes back to a basic feel of things while Randy Blythe’s vocals are still slightly evolving with age. I can’t pinpoint exactly what I dig about the sound of Mark Morton and Willie Adler’s guitar but I still really like them on this album and they sound a bit better in Wrath than on Sacrament because there is that rawness factor again and not such a clean-cut edge to them. They keep if fairly simple but acceptable and I think that’s what everyone digs about it. Chris Adler’s drumming is awesome as usual, even though he loves that flat sounding snare drum that only he can get away with.

Here are a few of the stand-out tracks from Wrath. I love the acoustic and clean parts in the beginning of songs like The Passing and Grace. The rest of The Passing has such a cool thematic feel to it with the melodies layered with the drawn out powerful, yet basic power-chord rhythms. Set To Fail we’ve all heard and to me is (almost) the best song on the album. The intro to Grace has a clean, classical number that you wish would continue but it leads in to riffs that kind of make you happy in the pants and is an overall great song. Contractor we’ve all heard too and the first time I heard it, I couldn’t stop listening. I swear that I listened to it at least 10 times in a row when it was available for download. Reclamation is the longest song on the album and is the last truly stand out track, with heavy/mellow/heavy breakdowns here and there. I heard someone say that this is the epic track on the album and at the time I didn’t give it much thought. After listening a couple more times, this is my favorite song on the album. Reclamation could indeed be called the “epic” track on Wrath. Lyrically, Wrath is your typical politics/religion hating Lamb Of God album.

While I’m not completely blown away by Wrath, I still think it’s a good, solid Lamb Of God album. Like everyone else, I don’t think they can ever top Ashes Of The Wake but in no way are they on a downward spiral with Sacrament and Wrath. You have to admit that with each album comes something slightly different. Musically progressive and aggressive songwriting. They may not be extremely technical by any means, but they still know how to write great, fist pounding, head banging songs.  I doubt if many people will be truly disappointed by Wrath but there will be plenty of more mixed feelings about it.

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