ARTIST: Lamb of God
ALBUM TITLE: Resolution
RECORD LABEL: Epic Records
RELEASED: January 24, 2011

By Eric Stuckart
Creator, Destroyer

Since breaking into the mainstream back in 2004 with their major label debut Ashes of the Wake, it’s been interesting watching Lamb of God’s trajectory. Unlike many metal bands that get snatched up by the majors just when they’re ripe for picking, the band took the less likely route, refusing to water down their sound.

Resolution is their seventh album as a band, and their fourth on Epic, and despite the band having settled quite well into the well-worn territories of groove metal, they’re still going strong, and they’re not mellowing out any either. If anything, this album had more than a couple surprises that even I wasn’t expecting, far surpassing 2009’s Wrath, which found the band more or less playing it safe, coloring in the lines that they drew themselves with their past few efforts.

The album immediately goes for the throat, opening with “Straight for the Sun,” a raw, sludgy number that earns them the achievement of being the slowest song they’ve ever recorded on an album, and frontman Randy Blythe sounds like he literally coughed up a lung performing the vocals, which considering his style is really saying something. This is quickly countered by “Desolation,” a song that literally jumps out the gate from the song before it, pummeling anything that was left standing.

The noticeable thing about Resolution is how confident the band sound. Unlike on Wrath, which sounded like the album that the band thought was expected of them, this one is particularly hellbent on going its own way, regardless of the outcome. How else would you be able to explain the band opening up with a sludgy, doom-inflected song, only to finish it off with “King Me,” a sprawling epic (for Lamb of God, at least) that lasts nearly seven minutes and ends with female opera vocals and an orchestral arrangement?

Despite how it sounds, this isn’t the sound of the band tempering their sound to make their music more marketable, or some kind of desperate plea for mainstream attention; everything Lamb of God is doing on this album is done so on their terms, and doesn’t feel forced. It’s the natural progression of a band finally breaking free from the chains that seemingly held them in a bit of a holding pattern, debatably over the course of their last four albums.

Sure, all of those albums had their moments, but they all had such a similar style that — discounting production values — they  could have been interchangeable from one album to the next. Resolution isn’t so much of a drastic change that they sound like a completely different band, but it shows enough artistic growth that when some of the less adventurous songs pop up from time to time (“Guilty,” “Cheated” and “Terminally Unique” all come to mind) it’s a bit more forgivable. The only down side to such songs, though, is that Resolution‘s momentum takes a hit each time one of these songs pops up, but the band quickly picks up the slack.

Even a song like “Insurrection,” which features completely clean vocals for the first time — a definite no-no in the oft-closed minded world of metal — sounds more like it was placed in the song for dramatic effect rather than to weasel its way onto radio. It’s a potent curveball that the band throws about three quarters of the way through the album, and it works quite well. The song starts out sounding like what would be best described as modern/alternative rock, but it progressively gets heavier and the cleans give way to Blythe’s typical growled style.

If there’s one complaint that I have about Resolution, it’s that it feels a bit long. Despite only being a scant few minutes longer than any of their albums, clocking in around the 55 minute mark, it pushes the album from being a great metal album to being just a good one. With a few of the songs peppered throughout being a bit interchangeable in both sound and style, trimming some of the fat might have given Resolution a bit more bite. As it is, it’s nothing that really ruins the experience, but it does tend to drag from time to time.

Everything that has made Lamb of God who they are today is found on Resolution in one way or another and the band sounds more energized than they have in a while. Without a doubt, this is due to the fact that they relied less on fitting the mold of their past few albums, and even though there’s a bit of lag in a few of the songs, one cannot deny their ability to still create challenging, relevant metal, all while playing up to their strengths on a technical level.

RATING: 8/10

Front page photo from mymetalbin.com, interior photo from nuskull.hu.