Lamb Of God - Sacrament

Genre: Death Metal

Name: Lamb Of God

Album: Sacrament (2006)

Virginia: where Death Metal is good

Now, as you may have guessed from previous reviews, I am not the biggest fan of Death Metal. I have the odd band that deserves its place on my iTunes - Opeth, for example, or Lair Of The Minotaur (although the latter is mostly because of the names - I mean, "Assassins Of The Cursed Mist" is just hilarious), but as a general rule, I shun Death Metal, making sure that it is kept alone in the corner of the room with the Dunce hat on its head. I don't like it much. In fact, that is somewhat of an understatement. I think Death Metal did for Metal what Stalin did for Communism.

There are, on Encyclopaedia Metallum over twenty-six thousand Death Metal bands, accounting for over 35% of the total number of bands on the website. By contrast, Thrash Metal has only 17 thousand, Heavy has only 11 and Power a mere 5 (they have 11 genres in total, so the mean value is about 6,000. Death metal has over 4 times this amount).
This is, of course, not counting the thousands more bands out there, as yet unsigned. The true figure is probably over thirty thousand, even being conservative. Death Metal is saturating its own market. To bring it closer to home, a friend of mine quit the band purely because it was Death Metal, and he realised that it was never going anywhere.

But why does this subgenre proliferate, whereas others remain confined to the shadows and lurk in the depths of obscurity? I think the answer is fairly simple - it's easy to play.
Most Death Metal songs are in commontime and are played in straight quavers, semiquavers and crotchets. Most Death Metal songs are riff-based and use repeated power chords as their main tune. Most Death Metal songs are short, most Death metal songs have a bass copying the guitar and most Death Metal songs have, in some form or another, the beat blast drumming. It is this kind of simplicity that often drives people to metal in the first place – they’re sick of hearing the same I-IV-V-I chord structure on the radio, with whichever band happens to be popular at the moment droning over the top about whichever girl the singer saw on the train going to the recording studio.

Let me assure you that I accept this is a generalisation. I know that not all bands are play in 4-4, not all bands keep to the same chord pattern for the whole song and not all bands have unoriginal and ancillary drums, but it is perfectly true for most Death Metal bands, and that cannot be disputed.
Everything about the songs is designed to sound difficult: Yes, the songs are fast, and yes, it is difficult to get up to that speed, but not that difficult – most guitarists or drummers can play at these speeds, and whilst they should be proud of this, it is not a unique feature – these are not a “select few” by any stretch of the imagination. The vocals are designed to sound hard to replicate, and yes they are – you can damage your vocal chords significantly by doing this, even to the point, supposedly, of throat cancer. They are difficult to do, in the same what that it’s difficult to swallow a live grenade whole – that doesn’t mean that it’s impressive.

But besides this, everything seems added-on to the main piece. Let’s look at it on an instrument by instrument basis. The Guitar is often just the same one or two simple riffs on repeat. The bass usually is just mirroring the guitar, and the drums are just there to add to the noise. The vocals – well, I’ll get onto them in a minute, if you can bear the suspense.

In short, the entire thing is just noise, with these things added on to give the pretence of music. Every instrument is there simply because it “needs” to be there. You couldn’t have a band without a guitar, so let’s throw something in for that. The same for bass, and the same for drums, and the same for vocals.

But the vocals themselves demand attention in their own right. Firstly, unlike most other genres, they are not poetic, nor are they designed to be. They are, often, prose. There is nothing wrong with that at all. But look at the contents:

My Latex Queen, by Dark Funeral
Latex queen - feel my tongue in deep
Whirls around - climax is almost found
I rise to my feet - erection slides in deep
I pound you hard - latex queen feels so sweet
Feels so sweet...

Psychopathologist, by Carcass
I like to slide my hand inside your stomach
And rip out the putrid remains,
Drink the pus and munch on the internal organs
Until all the casket is drained.

Necropedophile, by Cannibal Corpse
I begin the dead sex, licking her young, rotted orifice
I cum in her cold cunt, shivering with ecstasy
for nine days straight I do the same
She becomes by dead, decayed child sex slave
her neck I hack, cutting through the back
I use her mouth to eject

Another song, from the aforementioned band of my friend, was called “Trepanation”. For those of you who don’t know, that’s the practice of drilling holes in people’s heads to relieve headaches. And yes, it was described in graphic detail.

These lyrics are disgusting – intentionally so. And that is part of the problem. The whole point of Death Metal is “sticking it to the man”. It’s about dragging up the sordid elements of humanity, about the hypocrisy of society, about breaking free from social norms and doing your own thing – Anarchy. (Ironically, you’re not, because there are twenty six-thousand other bands doing the same thing, but that’s already been said). There’s nothing wrong with that. But instead of pointing out these problems, or commenting on them, they instead simply try to shock people. They want people to be revolted. They feel obliged to, as a Death Metal band. Occasionally, they put on a facade of intelligence by using long or scientific words – Putrefaction, enzyme, lecherous – but overall these add nothing – they are describing these things for the sake of it. They are easy to write about, and they have great effect. When you’re trying to add lyrics to a song, why not just fall back on this generic and unoriginal topic? It’s a quick, simple fix.

Now, I coul abide all this – I don’t complain about the Satanism or National Socialism abundant in Black Metal. I don’t complain about My Dying Bride’s “erotic” lyrics. I don’t complain about the more simplistic and dull melodies found in much Thrash metal – if it were not for one thing. Death Metal is seen as representative of all metal. And this infuriates me.

Ask any fan of The Killers or of Jay-Z or of Eminem what metal sounds like, and they will always, without fail, say that it is screaming and fast and loud. Never mind the fact that Metallica, the most famous metal band in the world (open to dispute, but I would say so) are not representative of this. Death Metal makes its mark – it crops up in the news as the reason why some teenagers have murdered some other teenager, for example, and people assume that all metal is like that. And that is simply not true. Not all metal is angry. Not every metalhead is a Satanist. We don’t all run round in corpse paint with knives in our hands trying to mutilate defenceless old ladies in Tesco before devouring the beaten heart with our recently-bought ketchup and chips. We are all tarnished with the same brush. And that is unfair.

So, in summary, the reasons I hate Death Metal are as follows:
1. It’s simple to the point of being boring
2. It’s far too dominant for its own good
3. It is designed purely to shock, and no thought that goes into either the lyrics or the music
4. It is seen as a representation of all metal, and hence people have preformed opinions about you when you say you listen to “metal”.
5. It’s not very good.

My apologies for this somewhat excessively long rant and for who disjointed it is. I will come back to it and edit it at some point. Now, onto the main business of the post.

After all this, you may be wondering why I have put Lamb of God up for your listening pleasure. It’s this simple: they don’t suck. They are one of the few Death Metal bands who, for one reason or another, don’t actually sound like the defacatory matter which their song is describing. The reasons in Lamb of God’s case are as follows. The riffs, whilst they are riffs, are interesting, and aren’t just simple chords on repeat. The lyrics actually have required some thought, and are about something the writer actually knows about, or has experienced (which I hope so much can’t be said about Cannibal Corpse). But, most of all, the drummer is a god.
This album in particular embodies all these features, so that is why I have posted it. Yes, it’s fairly old , but for those of you who haven’t heard any Lamb Of God before (do you live in a cave?), it’s a good starting point. But most of all, it proves that there is such a thing as good death metal
Enjoy!



Summary: Death Metal sucks, except for this album, and a very few others.
Lyrical Themes: Anger, Why Various Unnamed People Suck, Posers
Rating: 8/10

Track listing:
1. Walk With Me In Hell
2. Again We Rise
3. Redneck
4. Pathetic
5. Foot To The Throat
6. Descending
7. Blacken The Cursed Sun
8. Forgotten (Lost Angels)
9. Requiem
10. More Time To Kill
11. Beating On Death's Door

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