LAMB OF GOD MAY ACTUALLY BE THE COOLEST BAND OF ALL TIME

It seems like every band in the world either wants to be “their generation’s Metallica” or “their generation’s Slayer;” one of the few bands I think actually stands of chance of achieving the later goal is Lamb of God. They continue to make brutal, radio-unfriendly metal that still don’t sacrifice hooks for the sake of heaviness, and they’ve proven several times over that they can headline tours that play 5,000 person capacity venues just fine. In other words – not only are they fuckin’ great, but they’re not struggling. The appropriate audience has found them, and, at least for now, they seem like one of those bands that pretty much everyone can agree are awesome.

So now comes the announcement that on December 4 they’re going to re-release the best album of ’06, Sacrament, in a “deluxe edition” with bonus tracks – and while that may sound like the same money grubbing, fan fucking double dip we’ve all grown accustomed to at this point (thanks, Roadrunner!), the disc will actually have one undeniably super cool feature that will make it a must-own: it will feature isolated audio tracks for all instruments for all the songs on the album, which will, in effect, allow the fan to play producer and re-mix or re-record the songs in pretty much any way he or she sees fit.

I mean, there are just no words for how cool this is (or potentially is, I guess – it could suck, I suppose, but it sure founds fun). I don’t even know what’s gonna be on the bonus disc that comes with this re-release, and I don’t really care – it could be Randy Blythe farting into a mic – I just wanna upload the music to my computer and fuck around with it. Fans who felt Sacrament had good songs that were too polished production-wise can now remove keyboards and dirty it all up a bit; or you can make some NIN-style techno re-mix; or, of course, you can just go all karaoke on the damn thing, record your own guitars/bass/vox/drums/tamborine/whatever, and fulfill fanboy fantasies of being in such a great band in ways that “being” Slash in GH III could just never allow.

I’m pretty sure I’m calling in sick to work for the first month after this fucker is released.

-AR