If you heard Resolution before knowing anything about the band who made it, you'd be forgiven for mistaking Lamb of God's latest as the high-production, major-label debut of an energetic, upstart crew. At 14 songs and 57 minutes, Resolution feels like the sort of unedited, exhaustively long collection a label might get behind to see if at least one of the songs lands with a wide audience.
Such signs are everywhere on Resolution: Each of the choruses in these rigid Pantera-cum-Slayer recasts are aggressively emphasized, with thickets of backing vocals and rhythms and structures that slow or shift so as to beg you to swallow the hook. Lyrically, Lamb of God certainly write like a young band of heshers out for an angry good time-- Metallica quotes, subverted clichés, and diary-entry misanthropy laced with high-school vocabulary words and winking glimpses of profanity, drugs, and religion. And though the band is not only at its best but its most comfortable with four-minute formulaic tracks-- burst open, barrel ahead, shift at the bridge, regain momentum, and implode at the exit-- they take care to show that, even if young, they're versatile, too, the sort of band that boasts the promise of a varied future. There's the convincingly sludgy opener, the ghostly acoustic moments that serve as intros and interludes, and the creepy spoken-word surge of a closer. And it's all captured with big, bright production by Josh Wilbur, a major-label stable member who has worked with everyone from Steve Earle and Faith Hill to Pink and Limp Bizkit.
But Resolution is Lamb of God's seventh album and their fourth for Epic Records, making them one of the few current American metal bands to sign with and stay on a major label. They've done well there, too, peaking with a chart position of No. 2 for their most recent record, 2009's Wrath, which earned two Grammy nominations and sold a few hundred thousand copies. Those past stats and the Virginia band's status as relative metal statesmen for the mainstream make Resolution that much more disappointing in context.
Despite the handful of hooks that do stick and those big "risks," like the acoustic blues strums at the start of single "Ghost Walking" or the belligerent boogie that opens the much better "Invictus", Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries. After a decade of becoming arguably the biggest American metal band that either didn't exist when George H. W. Bush was president or didn't come from a cartoon, you would hope that Lamb of God had earned the right to be adventurous, to try and stretch their legacy wider than that of a band subservient to its predecessors. Resolution simply sounds like a refinement of their past, with their unquestionable technical prowess (especially impressive is the occasional interplay between guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler and drummer Chris Adler) funneled again into songs that would lose any distinction in a mixtape of their peers.
On "Invictus", this record's most structurally and lyrically compelling track, Randy Blythe roars the album's least instant but most interesting hook: "You brand it a crisis/ I name it an honor/ To face what arises/ To remain unconquered." That ethos reappears throughout Resolution, an album that, despite all this talk of bravery, lacks the resolve to sound anything but normal and predictable. With so much history and more than a million album sold, you'd think sounding mistakably young would be a compliment. But on Resolution, it doesn't equal a band bursting forth with ideas or burning with ambition; it means that, apart from the number of records they've sold, Lamb of God still need to find a way to make an impression last longer than an album cycle.
