The best news about the new Lamb Of God album “Wrath” is that it will thrill Lamb Of God fans everywhere. The riffs are fast and brutal, the vocals are barked with great authority and the drums double bass and blast beat throughout the entire album. The problem comes for anybody who isn’t a fan of Lamb Of God or is looking for something that stretches the limitations of what heavy music can be. It’s not that Lamb Of God are straight out boring, instead it feels at times like they want to expand what they do but then become nervous and resort back to what they’ve always done.

Wrath opens with “The Passing” a great piece of music that fooled me into thinking maybe Lamb Of God had decided to go for the music instead of what the genre wanted. The Passing announces the new album with a lulling acoustic intro that explodes into this incredibly powerful and dark riff. The sound of the tune is so ominous that when the dueling guitar solos come in they take you by complete surprise. By the end of The Passing I was expecting a whole new musical landscape from Lamb Of God.

The euphoria didn’t last as Wrath’s second track “In Your Words” quickly dissolved into paint-by-numbers Lamb Of God stuff featuring a Slayer/Pantera style riff with drums that switch between super fast and halftime. Vocalist Randy has a real presence on stage but little of that gets translated to the album. Instead we get this typical bark/growl/scream that seems to be the benchmark of current popular metal.

Reviewing an album like Wrath is really where a writer earns his keep because nothing here is easy. You can’t fully pan the album because it doesn’t suck but at the same time there’s nothing here to really get excited about. What’s even more disheartening is that sections of the album boarder on real brilliance but those are quickly castrated for the obligatory mosh parts and over-played solos.

Take the song “Contractor” which is smash faced super fast song that’s dirtier and meaner sounding than what Lamb Of God normally do. If the band had left that aspect alone it would’ve been killer but instead they take on this slow middle section that drags the entire song down. It also feels tacked on, like Lamb Of God were afraid that without their patented slow section people wouldn’t like the tune. That kind of insecurity peppers the record and it suffers because of it.

What do I mean by insecurities? I mean those chances that you can hear in the album that were never taken, those sections of the music made up largely of well-worn ideas that don’t push the band forward. In each and every song on Wrath there seems to be a fight going on between what Lamb Of God have done and what they might be able to do. The song “Dead Seeds” has a fantastic middle section that hammers into your skull with a type of brutality Lamb Of God aren’t known for. I wanted the entire song to be made up of that part instead of being flanked on all sides by a riff that slithers between straight boring and massively over played.

Then there’s the seven-minute epic “Reclamation” which is a study on how a song falls apart. It opens with something really dark and quiet and then builds into something very cool that starts falling apart almost instantly. As each section is introduced a new level of boredom sets in. By the time the song is over I was incredibly bored and that is not what you want the last track on your album to do.

Perhaps Lamb Of God has been more affected by their jump to a major label then they realize or maybe they’ve been worshipped for so long the band has become lazy and complacent. Whatever the reason they seem to be spinning their wheels in the mud, which is a real shame from band whose first two albums were so incredible.

Lamb Of God will always have a place in the world of metal; they’ve achieved that much without question. Whether or not they are able to become true legends of the genre is up to them and whether or not they decide to start pushing themselves.