ALBUM REVIEW: Into Oblivion – Lamb of God
LAMB OF GOD have always made their best music under pressure. VII: Sturm Und Drang arrived in the aftermath of Randy Blythe‘s acquittal on a manslaughter charge in the Czech Republic, a record forged from one man at his psychological limit. Into Oblivion, their tenth studio album, returns to that crucible. The difference is that the pressure is no longer Blythe‘s alone. It belongs to all of us, and the fury it produces is their finest work in a decade.
That fury is immediate and unrelenting. The title track opens with Blythe venomously seething: “I am the chaos, I am the voice you can’t unhear” and John Campbell‘s bass pressing against your neck like a noose as Art Cruz‘s drums pound with the conviction of someone trying to break through concrete. Recorded at Total Access Recording in Redondo Beach, the same studio that gave the world BLACK FLAG’s My War, Blythe‘s vocals are rawer, more unguarded, and more aggressively punk than anything he has committed to tape in years.
At just under forty minutes, these are songs that know precisely what they are. Omens, written and recorded in haste, felt like a band running on fumes; Into Oblivion is the sound of LAMB OF GOD hitting the reset button. Leaner, tighter and more focused than anything since Sturm Und Drang, each track hits its mark and moves on before you’ve caught your breath. Parasocial Christ arrives like a wrecking ball, Cruz’s blast beats ringing like an iPhone alarm giving you night terrors, as Blythe eviscerates the age of wilful self-delusion, “just empty pages in a glowing casket” landing like a slap. Sepsis builds around a spine-chilling industrial bassline before erupting into a THE BIRTHDAY PARTY-era Nick Cave-inflected howl, among the most unsettling things in their catalogue. This is banger after banger, and it does not let up.
The political argument is specific and unsparing, driven by industrial, brutalist soundscapes. The Killing Floor deploys a “red Caesar rising” not as decorative mythology but as cold historical reckoning, before detonating into a machine-gun assault that physically jolts. St. Catherine’s Wheel is brutalist and cyclical, its spiralling riffs tightening like a vice. Bully is three and a half minutes of groove-locked karmic reckoning, forming part of the most politically coherent sequence since Ashes Of The Wake.
El Vacío provides the emotional counterweight, arriving mid-record like a clearing in a storm. A eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson and GWAR‘s Dave Brockie, two voices Blythe wishes were still here to make sense of the madness, the grief in it is real and it changes how everything around it sounds. It’s eerily gothic and industrial in parts, a twisted manipulation of LAMB OF GOD’s DNA for dramatic effect.
Sturm Und Drang was born from one man’s dark night of the soul. Into Oblivion is born from an entire civilisation’s. Omens and New American Gospel aside, LAMB OF GOD have spent thirty years getting progressively better at this, each record sharpening a band that refuses to stand still, and Into Oblivion is the latest proof. The stakes have never felt more unsurvivable, and neither has the moshpits these 10 tracks will start.
Rating: 9/10
Into Oblivion is set for release on March 13th via Century Media & Epic Records.
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