LAMB OF GOD: “GHOST WALKING”

For those of you who subscribe to DECIBEL magazine or happened to see our post about DECIBEL’s “Best of 2011” list, you know that Lamb of God is on the cover, right above this headline: “INSIDE 2012’S BIGGEST METAL RECORD”. That’s a pretty big claim, especially since the album isn’t out yet — but it’s coming. And today, Metal Sucks premiered the first song from the album, “Ghost Walking”.

The long feature story in DECIBEL about the band and the making of the album (which is titled Resolution) includes this quote from Randy Blythe: “This is the first Lamb of God record that I actually like listening to.” Nick Green, who wrote the piece, calls it “the most diverse-sounding Lamb of God offering to date, mostly because guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler each contributed about half the songs, and there’s a wild contrast between their songwriting styles” — with Morton providing the more hook-driven, straightforward songs and Adler writing songs that sound like journeys (“the weird and unconventional stuff”, as Chris Adler puts it in the article).

Based on the article, it appears the album will include “true bookends and an instrumental interlude”, and one of those bookends — a closer called “King Me” – begins with Blythe’s “hushed vocals draped in eerie echo effects” and then volleys back and forth between his harsh vocals and an operatic female vocalist, with lyrics in Latin adapted from Mozart’s Requiem. There’s also reportedly “an arty and angular” song called “The Number Six” and “a bona-fide punk rock song” called “Cheated”. Yeah, that all sounds pretty diverse.

Unlike Nick Green, I haven’t heard the new album, and it sounds like trying to get a sense of the whole from any one song is likely to be a fruitless enterprise. But for now, one song is what we have. “Ghost Walking” begins with some rapid acoustic picking and then jumps into an instantly recognizable LoG hammer-fest — groovy, loaded with pneumatic riffs, and juiced up with a shreddy solo. Blythe growls and howls in good form, too.

This is clearly one of Mark Morton’s songs, which isn’t a surprising choice for the album’s first single release. It’s a crowd-pleaser. Go give it a listen at Metal Sucks HERE.