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 least be focused havoc: this is just boring, and it’s often difficult to separate the instruments from each other. Make that impossible. Not that many people will notice. This album will sell a lot of copies, because it’s loud, and pissed. There seems to be a rampant lack of artistic appreciation in the metal community, and it seems driven by the same gluttonous Id that gobbles down reality television: if it’s there, consume. It seems with this type of music, the experience is so primal that it’s only in hindsight– when the mosh pit has died down and we are washing the puke out of our hoodies– that you discover who were the innovators, and who were…well, sheep.

The ghost of Trendkill-era Pantera is invoked more than once here, but there is no soul: only the unpleasant sense of having heard this all before, and how much better it’s been done– by Lamb of God themselves, even. The stakes have been raised with every release since their breakout in 2004, but the guys in the band (or at least the producer) should understand that you can only tighten the screws so much before something breaks. The volume is up; the speed is up; the drumming is up– so elaborate and inhumanly precise, in fact, that you can’t imagine it being put together by a live person, but rather some berserk robot welder. How far into routine brutality does a band dare edge before they become caricatures of themselves? Listen to the way “Set To Fail” comes at you like a nightmare game of whack-a-mole.

“Dead Seeds” is almost successful with its woozy main riff, snapping like a downed power line, but the song soon loses its identity in a storm of mediocrity. There are other glimpses of inspiration, but not many, and too spread out to matter. The high points cannot rise above the sludge.

Listen to the first thirty seconds of “Ruin” from their 2004 release, “As the Palaces Burn.” Listen to the confidence of the riffing. It’s wicked to the bone. The relentless building of intensity. The way that Randy Blythe’s acid-throated howl sounds earned. That was when this band still had the potential to be called great.