Lamb of God tours through Des Moines while awaiting ‘Resolution’

Lamb of God plays the Val Air Ballroom on Tuesday, Dec. 4 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $32 in advance and $35 day of show.

It has not been an easy year for Lamb of God. The band released its seventh studio album, “Resolution,” in January of this year and was set to tour the U.S. in support of it this summer. Those plans were put on hold in June when front man Randy Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic on manslaughter charges.                

The charges stem from a May 24, 2010, incident in Prague, when Blythe allegedly confronted a 19-year-old fan who had repeatedly climbed on stage, so Blythe pushed him off the stage, according to reports, and the fall resulted in a head trauma. The young man died in the hospital about a month later. Blythe was arrested this June when the band arrived in Prague to play a date and was held in jail until Aug. 2, when he was finally released on bail. As of this writing, the band waits for word from the Prague State Attorney’s Office as to whether the prosecutor will move forward with the case or drop the charges.                 

“We’re all kind of sitting on pins and needles,” said guitarist Willie Adler in an interview from Atlanta. “(We’re) hoping that we’re waiting on good news. We’re really positive and keeping our heads up. We know in our heart of hearts that it’s bogus, so hopefully justice will prevail. It’s a real hard thing to think about.”                

But Lamb of God isn’t the kind of band to let a little thing like the stress of a potential manslaughter trial keep them from doing what they do best. As soon they were able, the band members hit the road again, and their U.S. tour to support “Resolution” is in full swing. If anything, the time off has been good for the tour, as it’s given fans a chance to familiarize themselves with the new songs.                 

“The reaction (to the album) has been great,” Adler said. “It’s actually been nice that it has been out for a little while now, to give the kids a chance to digest it before we came out and played the songs. A lot of times, it’s fairly awkward to play songs that the fans aren’t really familiar with. So, yeah, it’s almost a blessing in disguise that it took this long to hit the states.”                 

For its part, “Resolution” is probably the band’s most adventurous album to date. The band moves incrementally away from its thrash-and-crash roots to provide an album that’s more dynamic while still remaining truly metal.                 

“We never want to recreate the same album,” Adler explained. “I think we’re all at a point in our careers that we were able to branch out and do things that we probably wouldn’t have previously. This album, and us being in the position that we are in, we knew this was the right time to dive into stuff that we really wanted to hear on our own records.”             

“That’s not to say that we’re going to go out and make a completely different record,” he continued. “It’s always going to be a Lamb record. But we don’t necessarily have anything left to prove. It’s a little bit more freedom to be able to say, ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be fucking heavy-heavy-heavy-heavy all the time.’ ”                 

That feeling of creative freedom has led to an album that’s managed to please fans and critics alike, with Q magazine calling the album “a furious and unrelenting broadside of searing riffs and invention.” For his part, Adler describes the album more simply:                 

“It was fun as shit to write.” CV