We do not live in a golden age of major-label heavy metal. Gone are the days when many of the worldwide form’s biggest innovators earned large budgets from still-larger companies or bidding wars occurred for the most brutal new prospect. Though there are exceptions, most modern metal backed by largesse aims so squarely for genre rigidity and predictability that it’s hard to believe it requires humans to make. It’s as though the stuff comes from a factory in some anonymous and once-economically depressed flyover town, conveniently produced in five-band package tours that are almost impossible to distinguish but easy to absorb. Meanwhile, the new metal records that seem destined to matter as masterpieces, like Tribulation’s recent Children of the Night, arrive largely from the indie fringes. After three decades under Rick Rubin’s aegis, even the mighty Slayer have decamped to an indie for the forthcoming Repentless.
During the past decade, Lamb of God have struggled with such a fate. Since signing to Epic Records for their third album, 2004’s Ashes of the Wake, they’ve often seemed a rather regimented metal band. Every two or three years, they would churn out another 10 or so songs, with big grooves and death metal outbursts decorated by lots and lots of guitars. Randy Blythe was a rampaging frontman, the kind who encouraged that you get loud with his tirades. But Lamb of God always teased the edges of their sound, trying to push beyond their meat-and-potatoes metal reputation with each release. It’s as if they felt guilty about their well-heeled position on Epic and tried to use it to gradually inch away from stylistic and financial safety, somehow back toward the fringes. By the time they issued 2012’s Resolution, such distractions had wantonly diluted their strengths, resulting in an abysmal record of mediocre hooks and banal studio gimmicks.
Despite the highfaluting combination of Roman numerals and German words it takes as a title, Lamb of God’s very good seventh album, VII: Sturm und Drang, is a satisfactorily settled record, arguably their first such effort in a decade. Sturm und Drang takes decidedly few chances. Instead, it sticks mostly to up-tempo numbers, countered only by a clean-singing ballad that soon enough heads for the pit and a righteous stomper that eventually sublimates into something like shoegaze with the help of Deftone Chino Moreno. All of these songs are studded with enormous refrains and driven by a sense of urgency that Lamb of God have forsaken in recent years. When Blythe’s distended scream rips across howling amplifiers at the start of "Still Echoes", or when "Delusion Pandemic" snaps right into a belligerent stomp, it’s as if they’ve finally got too much to say to fuck around with being fancy. By not trying to be overly interesting or involved, Lamb of God have made one of their most alluring albums in years.
The newfound energy and efficiency seem to stem, in part, from between-album trauma: In 2012, months after the release of Resolution, Czech police arrested Blythe in a Prague airport. He spent five weeks awaiting trial for a manslaughter charge after he pushed a teenaged fan, who subsequently died, off the stage at a concert there two years earlier. Blythe was acquitted, but the process hung like a cloud around the band. They scrapped plans for shows and talked about taking a long break. Rather than languish, however, Lamb of God reassembled in the studio and got to work on several songs that examined the frontman’s time in prison and his rather hostile feelings at large.
The obvious approach worked: "Still Echoes" explores the Nazi history of Prague’s Pankrác Prison, his anger for the subject animating the song with feeling. The guitars twist and scrape like the anxious hands of a very nervous person. It smartly points to Blythe’s prison time without exploiting it, powerfully suggesting that his stint inside allowed him to think about the rest of the world’s problems just as much as his own. And though the irrepressible "512" is named for the cell where Blythe spent some time, it’s penned from a much broader perspective. He serves not as the prisoner but as the spokesmen for them. "My hands are painted red/ My future is painted black/ I’ve become someone else," he screams in one of the band’s best choruses ever, deflecting much of the blame at a society that creates its own criminals. He lodges similar criticisms during the bracing-and-racing "Footprints", a song about environmental degradation, and the wonderfully thrashing spree "Delusion Pandemic", a madman philippic on Internet culture. As laughable as Blythe’s hook about mockingbirds being fed to wolves may be, it’s an irresistible moment.
As with the other numbers about self-immolating heroes, Nazi assassins, or media distortion, every song on Sturm und Drang feels like an outburst unmitigated by extraneous tinkering or trials. The production is dense, thin, and minimal, the guitars and drums pushed tight to give all these lyrics extra oomph. The fancy features are limited to a talkbox solo here and a Henry Rollins-like spoken-word bit there. Rather than distract from the hooks, they only reinforce them through contrast. No, Sturm und Drang isn’t a landmark of major-label heavy metal, but it is a reminder of just how very good one of its biggest bands can be when they have something to worry about other than trying so hard to be important.
