While Lamb of God is still one of the standard bearers of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, they’ve changed up their vocal tactics a bit in recent years. “Overlord,” a track from vii: Sturm Und Drang, featured clean vocals from singer Randy Blythe for the first time on an LoG album, then last year, they followed it up with “The Duke,” a song featuring all clean vocals from Blythe. While the fan reaction has been mixed, bassist John Campbell said his heart sank when he heard that his vocalist was going clean. Speaking to the Salt Lake Tribune, Campbell remembers:
“They played it back for me and said, ‘Hey, I just wanna tell you something — Randy’s singing on this.’ And my heart dropped — I’ve heard him singing on the bus, just goofing off, and it’s not good! But obviously, that’s just him joking around,” he said. “So my heart sank, I was a little nervous, and then the track came on and I was completely blown away. He completely nailed it and effectively used that in his palette for doing vocals.”
As for whether the future will hold more clean vocals from the band, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that there will be, with Campbell saying “I would imagine, yes.”
“I think some people still have a hard time with [it]. But we’re always trying to evolve and come up with new ways to present heavy music,” Campbell said. “Not that it gets boring, but, you know, we don’t want to go out there and play the same songs every night, or play the same set and have every song be exactly the same. It’s nice to have some different emotions, some different dynamics to the set.”
They’ll have some time to figure that out, as the band will be going on a hiatus now with the Slayer/Behemoth tour over. Campbell says they might have one more tour in them for this album cycle, but that remains to be seen.
