What a promising start Lamb of God had, only to arrive here, so noisily uninspired and undeserving: Wrath is a stool sample. To be routinely inspected, and flushed.
This is about as sonically interesting as a firing squad. Drums pummel. Screams erupt. Yeah, yeah. Over-produced guitars buzz deep down in the mix, emerging occasionally to a lockstep chug inside a well-defined comfort zone bookended by pinch harmonics. It’s a thrash album, to be sure, which certainly gives it license to create as much havoc as possible, but it ought to at …

The word independent– indie– gets tossed around a lot, sometimes without people knowing what exactly it means– or, rather, what they mean. Are we talking about the form of the art itself, or the avenue of its creation? We’re obsessive classifiers; compulsive cataloguers. I suppose it helps to label things as a way to keep our shelves (and lives) from being in total disarray, but sometimes we don’t do ourselves justice.
There is a sound sneaking through Jeffery Straker’s music that I had trouble identifying. While on the surface Step Right Up feels very much like a pop …