Lamb of God – Resolution

January 24, 2012 • Epic Records

I hardly feel that I should be reviewing this album at all; for the last few albums Lamb of God has pigeonholed themselves into a sound that hasn't changed for years. Having heard their last album, Wrath, I am having trouble telling the difference between that and this one, and consequently Resolution hardly offers any reason to listen to it.

If anything, the band's signature style of groove metal has only gotten a bit safer and poppier—songs have more structure, riffs are catchier, drums are groovier. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, and at more than a few points I found the music to be pretty nice in terms of headbangability. We still get a lot of nice breakdowns, fast chugging guitar lines, highly technical riffs, etc., all the things that give the band its sound. And for what it's worth they haven't lost their talent in terms of making this sort of music.

But that might even be part of the problem: they've become so comfortable with what they're doing that they can't break out and try anything new and different. I feel like one could make an album out of any track from Ashes of the Wake or later picked at random and it would sound pretty consistent. And that's a pretty long time to be churning out the same album time and time again. Granted, Ashes of the Wake and even Sacrament were enjoyable to me for quite some time but now I'm just tired of the whole thing; it's even gotten to the point where the last half of each track can be pretty safely skipped and nothing will have been missed. Going along with the songs having more structure and catchiness, that also goes along with more repetition and near-pop-like verse/chorus/verse layouts which, while they've always been present in Lamb of God's songs, are even more flagrant this time around.

There is one upshot though: if you manage to make it to the end of the album, "Visitation" is actually a really cool song—I'm not really sure what makes it stand out from the others, but I really noticed it on my first listen. Perhaps it's because it sounds a bit more progressive with some more complex structure, dissonant guitar lines, some different vocal techniques, things like that. It's hard to say.

But regardless, the majority of the album just bores me, and I had a lot of difficulty going through it a second time. It's just more of the same from Lamb of God and I don't see any reason to listen to this over anything else they've released; it's just so jading. I'm not saying they've failed to make another Lamb of God album, it's just that it wasn't what the world needed.

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