LAMB OF GOD GOING ON HIATUS IN ’08, BUT AT LEAST WE HAVE THE SACRAMENT RE-RELEASE TO TIDE US OVER
When we saw Lamb of God here in NYC last week, front man Randy Blythe announced from the stage that Lamb of God are taking 2008 off – yes, the entire fucking year – and would return with a new album in ’09 that will “really rub your dicks in the dirt.” Good for these dudes for being successful enough that they can afford to do that – but as a selfish fan, that idea of the first Lamb of Godless year this decade really bums me out.
Think about it: even if at least one musical side-project emerges during that band’s hiatus (and it’s kind of hard me to imagine one won’t, since from the Stones onward, pretty much every big rock band since that’s taken a long break has produced at least one solo or side project), you know the chances of it being as good as LOG are slim to none. I mean, think about the number of metal bands that have put out as many consecutively killer albums as LOG – do you think you need more than ten fingers to do it? Of other bands of their generation – and I’d include a lot of bands that I love on that list, including KsE and Shadows Fall – only Mastodon have really had a similar streak.*
So what we have to tide ourselves over the next 365 days – and I’m quite sure that, at least for me personally, it could conceivably keep me entertained for up to a year – is the re-release of what I think I can safely say was MetalSucks’ collective favorite metal album of 2006, Sacrament. But instead of including some shitty bonus material, it includes a disc that features each song from the album broken down track by track – so you can load that shit up onto your computer and play with it for hours. Don’t believe me? On Tuesday I sat down with it, promising myself thirty minutes to futz around with one song before going to bed. Five hours later, I was still perfecting my re-mix of “Walk With Me in Hell.”
Not that all b-sides suck – there are plenty of perfectly great ones out there – but a lot of the ones I’ve been hearing on re-released albums these past couple of years have induced the same feeling as watching deleted scenes on a DVD: what you usually discover is that these pieces had no real good place in the greater whole, and they were rightfully dropped. So I find myself much more excited by this particular toy than I would have by, say, a live version of “Redneck” and some black metal experiment that was originally only released in Japan, Land of All the Extra Songs that We Don’t Get Here in America During an Album’s Initial Release.
But I digress.
Now, I’m sure those even geekier than I am will find some reason to be upset with this particular album add-on – the tracks come in mp3 format exclusively, at 192 kpbs – and since I’m no Trent Reznor-type, I’ve working exclusively on the shitty Mac Garage Band program that came with my computer. So sue me.
But there’s really so much you can do with these tracks… fuck. You can just toy around with it, mix it a million different ways – if I wasn’t the shittiest guitar player this side of Munky, I’d probably drop Mark Morton’s leads in favor of recording my own, which, I imagine, would have to be the ultimate fan boy role-playing ego trip. I’ve dropped instruments, added effects, loops, fucked with times and keys, and while I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call any of it “good,” it was all incredibly fun. Which, really, is the most important thing in life.
As a matter of fact, just sitting here writing about it is making me wanna go play with it some more (wow, taken out of context, that sentence could be quite droll). I think I’m gonna do “Descending” next. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in five hours.
-AR
*As a matter of fact – and I’m about to totally contradict everything I said in the first two paragraphs of this post – I have to be at least a little worried about the next Lamb of God offering, if only because once you include their Burn the Priest disc, they are, historically speaking, just about due to put out a disappointing album. Think about it: Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth all started to lose their touch at right about album #6 – and if you’re one of those people who doesn’t like Metallica or Countdown to Extinction, they lost it an album earlier.
