The Old Dominion in Song: Lamb of God’s “Hourglass” and Virginia’s Brand of Violence

With the release of their 2004 magnum opus Ashes of the Wake, Virginia’s Lamb of God cemented their position as the potent poster children of the early ’00s American heavy metal revival. The album was a visceral blend of riffs, bass-rich breakdowns and punishing rhythms laced with bristling critiques of neo-conservative foreign policy spoken in throaty vocals that hedged on the demonically Pentecostal.

Ashes of the Wake sold over 500,000 copies — an astonishing feat for a heavy metal album.

Consequently, the music press hailed Lamb of God as the heirs apparent to southern thrash metal. The band earned apt comparisons to Pantera, given singer Randy Blythe’s pugnacious delivery, the strong technical interplay of guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler and the lock-tight weave of bassist John Campbell and drummer Chris Adler.

No group in the canon of American popular music has captured the cultural tapestry of Richmond, Virginia in all its battered, proud, gothic splendor quite like Lamb of God. After all, every band is a product of its environment.

Lamb of God came of age in a Richmond underground titillated by the sound of hardcore punk. Bass player John Campbell once described the outfit as a “punk band that plays heavy metal music.” The forgotten ferocity of a city tucked ignominiously in the seam between Mid-Atlantic and Deep South bled onto the floors and walls at places like Benny’s, Hardtimes and the Mosque.

An entire generation of kids raised on Marshall Tucker and Ted Nugent augmented the languid compositional vocabulary of classic southern rock with blistering feedback, hard churning speed licks and confrontational vocals. As the external Black Flag influence bled into the scene, homegrown notes of heaviness began germinating into pounding and sometimes bizarre musical statements. Lamb of God is a kindred spirit to bands like Alabama Thunderpussy and Municipal Waste. Better still, the grandiose showmanship apparent in their style owes a great debt to GWAR.

Lamb of God first formed in 1994 under the oft-offending nom de amp Burn the Priest. That same year saw the release of This Toilet Earth, the fourth studio album from the costumed metal mavens. With gut-punching and humorous body blows like “SounderKommando” and “Fight”, This Toilet Earth presaged Lamb of God’s instrumental sensibility while influencing Randy Blythe’s presence in the mix.

There’s an obvious link between Oderus Urungus’ low register mic work and monstrous stagecraft and the howling, growling stomp of D. Randall Blythe. Blythe himself paid tribute to Gwar in a short anecdote published in a 2014 round-up story on ’80s music in Richmond. Randy waxed nostalgic on seeing the band for the first time while also tripping on three hits of acid.

Amidst a plethora of musical influences, there’s something deeper and darker lurking at the core of Lamb of God’s identity. The band’s thick roots in Richmond feed into a legacy of conflict.

In an interview given to filmmaker Sam Dunn for his 2006 documentary, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Mark Morton described the sonic ambiance of his Virginia childhood. “On a Saturday night, you hear guns,” Morton said, “It becomes part of the landscape.” “Your psyche,” Randy Blythe chimed in.

When you tell people from other parts of America that you’re from Virginia, they’ll likely remind you what a beautiful place it is. While true, the stunning aesthetic component doesn’t begin to justify a psychology haunted with an unseen and ceaseless sort of torment. This discontentment, this essential strain at the core of the Virginian being accounts for the profusion of restless, aggressive, shadowy musical forms to emerge from the Piedmont.

It’s written in state history and implanted on the Commonwealth’s cultural DNA. That combativeness is a great part of what Virginia is.

Tobacco and presidents: this was the substance of the mandatory Virginia history lab administered to fourth graders across the state. Later, the curious, disillusioned or well read will tack on bitumen and anthracite coal and slavery to the dubious list of products associated with the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Yet, the Old Dominion’s most prolific resource is rarely acknowledged. It has killed more than tobacco and held greater sway over the march of time than the rhetoric of Washington, Jefferson, Wilson and all the others. It is violence: a superlative export.

The Commonwealth’s bellicose heritage is felt worldwide. American ships sally forth across the globe from their home berths in Norfolk, the world’s largest Navy base. Clandestine strikes in anonymous and inaccessible terrain around the world begin at the SEAL base in Deep Creek. The Officers of the United States Marine Corps are baptized at Quantico. Up at the Pentagon, the efforts and aims of the most potent standing military in human history are coordinated in concentric rings of bureaucratic hierarchy. Within great palisades of shatterproof glass, the United States’ technological warfighting capacity builds in exponential accordance with Moore’s Law at Ballston’s DARPA. Out in Langley and various unmarked points to the west, the imprecise business of intelligence forecasting and surreptitious intervention proceeds undeterred.

Virginia’s violence is a well-established brand. Vandegrift and Chesty oversaw its acute application on Guadalcanal. The United States Third Army moved at the deliberate behest of a Virginia Military Institute Keydet. Even Erwin Rommel wove the legacy of Stonewall Jackson into the blitzkrieg.

Virginia hosted some of the most terrific, infamous and lethal campaigns of the Civil War. Cherished sons from rebel Robert E. Lee to Yankee George Thomas prosecuted a war heretofore unrivaled in the annals of American history. Years prior, Santa Anna tucked tail at Buena Vista before the army of Barboursville, Virginia’s own Zachary Taylor.

The Tidewater absorbed tormenting British raids in the War of 1812. The Marquis de Lafayette’s columns traced the roads of the Old Dominion in an elusive cat and mouse game during the Revolution. Bannister Tarlington’s horse raised dust through the Piedmont. Lord Cornwallis and the vaunted red coats ate crow at Yorktown. Benedict Arnold set Richmond aflame.

Old George Washington himself sojourned north beyond the Potomac to stir up a literal world of hurt at a place named Duquesne. Today, commuters in northern Virginia crowd the Braddock Road where Sir Peter Haklett and his host of ne’er do wells in the 44th Foot marched on their date with death in 1755.

Twenty-three hanged for Bacon’s Rebellion. Totopotomoi’s own crimson stained Bloody Run in 1656. Three Anglo-Powhatan Wars inaugurated Virginia’s spurious legacy with 16 years of total war between 1610 and 1646.

These conflicts are not a distant abstraction — they are spoken in a language writ large on the land itself. The soil is soaked in a flood tide of blood that oozes out to stain culture. Historical markers, marble and granite obelisks, cannons and caissons, snake-rail fences — these are the resilient ghosts that lurk in the early morning fog of the Virginian imagination.

There’s a sense of death grand yet inglorious that we cannot shake. There’s a cognizance of costs that can never be paid in full.

In a larger sense, Lamb of God is a beneficiary of that heritage of a lethal past. Though they are by no means cut from the cloth of unreconstructed Confederate nostalgia or Lost Cause sycophancy, their music exhibits certain markers of Virginia combat idolatry.

Very few who grow up pondering the tactical merits of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia find their mind wandering to daydreams of that Army hemmed up in the trenches at Petersburg. The Virginian consciousness of war is braided with a tradition of savage attacks where tenacity and superior momentum wipe a foe from the earth.

The Rebel Yell

Bombardments, assaults, volley-fire, flank attacks — this is the vocabulary of Virginia’s bellicose imagination. It’s also an apt lexicon for describing Lamb of God’s catalog. Ashes of the Wake exudes the guts and glory ethos of headlong charges and crushing maneuvers. The album format becomes as much a battlefield as Gaines Mill’ or Chancellorsville or Manassas.

It’s a 47-minute long microcosm of war, a sawing, pounding onslaught of savage sound. From the rifle shell carrying skeleton bird marking the cover to the cannon clad Mechanicsville Rebels t-shirt guitarist Willie Adler wore on tour, there are reminders of battle everywhere in Ashes of the Wake.

The album begins with a signal gun riff and drum roll before Randy Blythe issues an invocation with breathy repose. “If there was a single day I could live, a single breath I could take — I’d trade all the others away.” Blythe offers a benediction that charts the album’s central axis of assault: honor.

That single misunderstood word might be the most flummoxing bugaboo written into Southern culture. It’s a byword for masculine conduct — the preservation of self-image by hard-won acts of valor and impeccable standards of gallantry. It’s not a difficult thing to come by and is easily squandered, which might explain why this single abstract concept has been so privileged over the years. It cannot be bought.

The pursuit of honor has propelled Virginians to magnificent victories. Alas, it has also drawn them senselessly into lost and futile causes that bleed them of fortune, life and the universal dignity of history. Honor compelled Robert E. Lee to leave his country for his state. It propelled his armies to some of the most staggering underdog victories in the history of war. So too did it net ultimate defeat in a plunderous cataclysm that left a generation dead or mauled, an economy in tatters, and an agricultural ecology ruined.

Fans of Lamb of God’s dutifully compiled tour DVDs know that personal honor figures into the band’s dynamic. It has yielded mixed results. Perceived slights against his manhood led Randy Blythe to pick a Scotch-fueled fight with guitarist Mark Morton on the streets of Glasgow. In perhaps his finest hour, honor compelled Blythe to return to the Czech Republic to be vindicated of manslaughter charges in 2010.

This obsession with the embodiment of honor is extremely powerful as a central duality. It’s a double-edged sword that cuts equally with righteous glory and the tarnish of sorrow. It encompasses and reconciles a band that draws at once from traditions of war and outsider music. It encapsulates the promise of ultimate vindication and disastrous decline. It’s a perfect metaphor for the Virginia of 2004.

Ashes of the Wake might be the single most violent anti-war album of all time. It was recorded in early 2004 during the Al-Sadr Shiite uprising and subsequent battles in Iraq’s Al Anbar province. The album blends its aggressive instrumentation with a grim lyrical portrait of the American war machine.

“Everything suffocates in the dust of the past fortunes squandered / the empire of lies to whom you pandered” is but the tip of a conceptual iceberg. Prophecies of apocalyptic doom weave the specter of irreparable bodily and psychological harm with accusations of national betrayal. “No end in sight”, “hopeless”, “it’s only getting worse”, “witness shame’s parade” and “the burning home of the brave” shout in an angry chorus of laments uttered in the days after a dubious war.

As Iraq descended into chaos half a world away, administration press conferences built on reassuring Rumsfeld stares and dutiful Condi briefs lent a feeling of measured control. We didn’t get it right the first time, but trust us — we know what we’re doing, they seemed to say.

The timely genius of Ashes of the Wake was accomplished with a blend of confrontational post-punk metal style that embodied an impression of warfare. The guitar strewn, kick drum landscape painted a portrait of soaring air support, mortar detonations and near-constant automatic weapons fire. Above the fatalist soundscape, Blythe rearranged the terms of honor as a scale poised between the promise of valor and the cost of an unjust war.

The album bends and sags beneath the acknowledgment that what the United States Department of Defense had willfully foisted upon its own rank and file and the Iraqi people as a whole was a dishonorable blasphemy. Amidst Ashes of the Wake’s narrative of regret and shame, the butcher’s bill from Mesopotamia is not some abstract on a Pentagon spreadsheet, but a lucid sorrow that will never be fully repaid. Blythe and company refigure the Virginia military heritage from a schoolboy’s fascination told in bronze statues and regiment markers to a ceaseless toll spoken in row after row of headstones at places like Arlington National Cemetery.

In one of the album’s most brutal songs, “Hourglass”, the percussive parade shatters and reforms for a final climactic breakdown. “You finally made it home draped in the flag that you fell for”, Blythe barks. “And so it goes… the ashes of the wake”.

That the singer name-checks the album’s title as an immolated form of consequence is significant in its own right. More telling is the play on the words: “draped in the flag that you fell for”. It speaks of the nomenclature of sacrifice in the line of duty as much as it speaks of a greater dupe. National pride comingles with the faded honor of imperial ambitions.

Lamb of God’s combative acrimony presaged a larger rift in the Old Dominion during the Bush years. During the build up to the 2003 Invasion, the iconic contemporary warhorse bearing Virginia’s martial traditions, Jim Webb, became a vocal critic of the spurious agenda emanating from the Bush White House. A graduate of the Naval Academy, decorated combat Marine and former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, Webb was an unlikely voice in the anti-war choir.

Known as a hawk, Webb’s prior contributions to the Virginia political canon mostly revolved around his involvement in the 1994 Senate Campaign, when he attacked his former Annapolis classmate (and boxing nemesis), the Iran-Contra tarnished, eventual Fox News commentator, Oliver North. In 2006, Webb’s distaste for the foreign policy blunders of the Bush administration launched him into a Senate race against incumbent George Allen. A vocal proponent of the Iraq War and an administration surrogate for attacks on pro-war dissenters, Allen himself had no prior military service.

Though hedged on a wide swatch of issues, including one particularly glaring gaffe on Allen’s part (the now infamous “Macaca Moment” when Allen was caught on camera using the slur to refer to a Webb campaign staffer at an August 2006 rally in Breaks, Virginia), Webb eventually won the Senate seat by a margin of one-third of a percent. For many, the deciding issue was a referendum on the conduct of an increasingly grim war whose moral foundations had been all but completely eroded.

From the ballot box to the concert stage, Virginia is no stranger to conflict. By and large, its people do not shy from the sound of battle be it literal or metaphorical. Combativeness is a central tenet in a state dotted with reminders of war. Between an oft-visited “shrine” to a celebrity general and a roller coaster named the “Rebel Yell”, some might even argue Virginia society has a built-in lust for the bellicose.

That fondness is tempered with a quest for honor and palpable recollections of defeat. It’s a polarizing thing built of equal parts majesty and soul-crushing loss. Beyond creating a superlative-heavy metal album, Lamb of God’s true accomplishment was reconciling these two strains of war memory into a single artifact of the Virginia condition. At once ugly and mighty, Ashes of the Wake is a testament to the price a state and its people have paid from time immemorial for that opportunity to live a single day of victory.