Randy Blythe always knew the world was going to end. Born in 1971, he was too young to remember much about the Vietnam War, but acutely felt the scars it left on his country’s psyche, with a brew of paranoia and hostility constantly threatening to boil over into total nuclear annihilation.
“Even as a young child, I had the knowledge – in fact, the certainty – that one day I was going to die in a fiery nuclear explosion,” he says today. “The Russians – these people I didn’t even know – were going to bomb us, because that’s what the media was saying. Luckily, with the fall of the Soviet Union, that whole angst between these two superpowers calmed down. But the nukes never went away. At any point, we could eradicate all life on Earth. The tensions in the world feel like the Cold War firing up again. The angst is back.”
That angst is present on Omens, Lamb Of God’s ninth album. It’s another savage assault that lashes out at the indignities perpetrated against us by corrupt leaders, not to mention the poor decisions we’re making as a human race – ‘plastic in your bloodstream, plastic in your brain’, Randy laments on Denial Mechanism, referring to the scientific studies that prove the material is showing up in our bodies, and even the placentas of our unborn children. If you thought Lamb Of God’s songs were bleak before, this is a whole other level.
“If there’s a unifying theme of Omens, it’s to pay attention to what’s happened in the past, because it’s happening now,” Randy says. In other words, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’ “Authoritarian tendencies are rising up again – especially on the far right – and we have to pay attention to that so we don’t let the fucking demagogues have their way. We just don’t seem to be learning – motherfuckers, pay attention!”
Despite predicting the end
