Lamb of God

When he's on the road, every night is Friday night.

When he's not, it's time to change diapers.

It's a recent Monday afternoon, and Chris Adler is speaking from what has become a semi-unfamiliar place: his home.

As drummer for Richmond, Va.-based nouveau thrash fireballs Lamb of God, Adler has spent most of his adult life in a van or on a tour bus, often playing well over 200 gigs a year, logging more time in rest stops than in his own bed.

But today is his young daughter's birthday, and he gets to spend it with her.

Adler sounds pretty stoked about it, too, though he admits that being a heavy-metal dad is no easier than navigating his way through his band's knotty, relentlessly physical jams.

"It's a challenge to get readjusted to being home after being out so much," he says. "You're out there doing your thing, and then you come home and it's family time. Both are obviously complete polar opposites, so depending on how much time you spend doing one or the other, the other one seems harder to do. And we've been on the road more than we haven't."

In recent years, Lamb of God have become some of the most worldly dudes in metal, playing places as far flung as Thailand, the Philippines and India, where bands of their ilk -- or any other, for that matter -- seldom go.

It's all manifested itself in their music, complex, yet catchy concrete slabs of unrelenting, socially aware heavy metal.

Lamb of God's tunes are meant to overwhelm, with thick, layered, dual guitar riffing, Adler's athletic drumming and a frontman, Randy Blythe, who sounds as if he's trying to expel his lungs from his chest cavity with each vein-bursting bellow.

And Blythe's words can be just as heavy as Lamb of God's pointedly wince-inducing sonics.

The group's breakout third disc, 2004's "Ashes of the Wake," pulses with socio-political fire and brimstone.

"Send the children to the fire / Sons and daughters stack the pyre / Stoke the flame of the empire / Live to lie another day," Blythe growls on "Now You've Got Something To Die For." "Face of hypocrisy / Raping democracy / Apocalyptic, we count the days."

This kind of pan-global perspective has only been heightened as the group has ventured to new lands on tour.

"I think the things that have stuck out the most were places like Jakarta and Singapore where there's such a huge gap between the income levels in the country," Adler says. "Basically, the entire country is poor, except for this super rich, leading group of people -- and of course, those are the people who bring us down there. So, you're literally driving through these shantytowns on the way to your executive suite that they put you up in. It makes you feel kind of itchy inside. It doesn't feel right."

This kind of ambivalence, however, is decidedly absent from Lamb of God's latest disc, "Wrath," a straight shot to the jugular.

While the band's previous release, 2007's "Sacrament," was a turgid, tense album defined by a machinelike precision, "Wrath" is an organic sounding record, with a more loose, off-the-cuff feel and Blythe's incorporating touches of melody in with his gruff gutturalisms.

"With 'Wrath,' we definitely made a point to try to make a more raw sounding, slightly more aggressive album than 'Sacrament,' " Adler says. "But at the same time, we wanted to split it up with little interludes and passages in between songs, so that it was more of a journey for the listener rather than just getting hit in the face 10 times and then it being over."

When it was released in February 2009, "Wrath" premiered at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, a surprisingly high debut for such a dense, demanding disc.

It hasn't made Lamb of God a household name -- unless said household is populated with heavy metal hair farmers -- but even though his band's growing fortunes mean that he gets to see his family less and less, it only seems to make Adler value days like these more and more.

"Success in metal is probably nowhere close to what success in other music equals as far as your bank account or anything like that," Adler notes. "There's no beach house, and my place isn't full of chicks in bikinis," he chuckles, "but I think we'd be spoiled to say that we haven't enjoyed a bit of success."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.