Rating:
* * * *
Those little lambs from the historic American town of Richmond, Virginia, are back and marching off to the slaughter - your slaughter that is.
Lamb of God are a formidable act. However, in the past five years especially, they have remained accessible by ensuring the raw heaviness of their sound rubs alongside melodic hooks and grooves.
The band's last two albums,
Ashes of the Wake
(2004) and the Grammy nominated
Sacrament
(2006), were hugely popular, making them one of the heaviest and most extreme crossover metal bands around. Both records suffered from a samey sound which was reliant on the death grind groove. But there is nothing repetitive about
Wrath
- it's a twisted and mangled slammer.
Wrath
has a newfound pole-driving intensity and a more diverse dynamic that's galvanised solidly together. So
Contractor
retains those reckless head-banging bogan tendencies (including a hick "Yeeha" at the start), but all of the sudden it gives way to a screaming, jack-hammering breakdown which lifts you up and nails you beat-by-pummelling-beat into the ground.
Likewise on
Fake Messiah
, which brings together dead-beat and distant drums, circling riffs, and a gnashing vocal, making it the most metal of the tunes on offer here; and seven minute final track
Reclamation
unravels like a demented hallucination as discordant and woozy acoustic guitar launches into waves of devastating axe attack. There are reflective moments too, like the cheeky washes of waves on
Reclamation
and the gently plucked opening guitar of
Grace
, which turns out is a swindle as it lures you around the corner into the massacre of scything, razor-sharp riffs that await.
Vocally, Randy Blithe steps up too, with his gruff growl and rugged roar opening up into a more sonic yowl akin to Swedish rabble rousers Meshuggah. But Lamb Of God's melodic groove is far more accessible than the brutally technical Swedes, and they are just as appealing to fans of mainstream metallers Disturbed and Slipknot, as they are to fans of more flamboyant and technical metal like Opeth and Mastodon.
Wrath
is a stormer and a contender for most popular, if not one of the best, metal albums of the year.
Scott Kara
The host has been spotted across the Atlantic post-election.