Lamb Of God’s Into Oblivion is the kind of recording that should come with a cover-mounted gum shield, which is to say that metal stalwarts from Richmond, Virginia have cooked up yet another incendiary long-player that feels precision engineered to move the crowd, to fire up the pit.
Joining MusicRadar over Zoom, guitarist Mark Morton is here to talk about all things guitar, his partnership with Willie Adler, approach to tone in the studio, and of course his new Artist Series Gibson Les Paul Modern Quilt, a limited edition signature guitar that was much anticipated – as in we waited years for it – and sold out in a flash. But it would be remiss not to mention that, in Lamb Of God, you could argue that the auteur of their sound sits behind the drum set.
For years this was Adler’s brother, Chris. Since 2019, it has been Art Cruz. The more things change, the more they stay the same; rhythm remains so integral to the functioning of the Lamb Of God sound – it is their elastic sense of groove elevating them above their peers.
Article continues belowEven when throwing it down in the thrash-cum-hardcore rough-and-tumble of Parasocial Christ there’s still these loose-limbed quality. The rigid norms of metal guitar bent out of shape.
But as Morton explains here, that’s just what happens when he picks up the electric guitar. He was weaned on blues, the Texas shuffle of Billy F Gibbons and co, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Sabbath. This stuff comes naturally. Morton doesn’t have to think about it. The secret to it all? It can all be found in the pocket…
You were talking about your signature Les Paul and how you like the dynamics of passive electric guitar pickups. You collect vintage guitars. Your playing is informed by blues. It’s like Lamb of God have that old-school rock ’n' roll energy, only hot-wired for a more brutal era, musically speaking.
“I mean, we’re kind of a punk rock band, really. That’s really at the root, and at the foundation and the philosophy, the mindset of the band. It is a very much a punk rock band.”
...But with a boogie-woogie heart? Rhythmically, you’ve got as much in common with ZZ Top, that groove and swing, as you do with contemporary metal.
“Yeah, it’s groove, and it’s very much rooted in Top and [Lynyrd] Skynyrd. Sabbath is very groovy to me. All my favourite heavy bands have a real heavy groove presence. Pantera, of course!”
Yeah, drummers who can swing. Look at Bill Ward in Black Sabbath. He had that jazz sensibility. There is almost that sense of swing in the Lamb of God groove, too.
“It’s pocket, as much as swing. Pocket, which is to me more of a swagger. Swing is there too. In a lot of the early stuff there was a very specific swing to it, but there’s also pocket. That’s the thing we really, really employ, just kind of like slight stalls in the rhythm, almost implied, but that gives it a kind of strut, and that’s the stuff we actually pay close attention to.”
We’re so attuned to each other’s playing and our right hand, so I can jump up a little more, perch right on top of the click, and play where he’s at, or he can kind of drag a little bit, just ever so slightly
Is that the most difficult thing to nail, that sense of pocket, especially with you and Willie working out where to bob and weave with those riffs.
“If we’re talking about pocket timing, Willie is precise. He’s dead-ass on top of the beat. Like, he’s right on it. I’m a little behind it. But either of us can adjust.
“We’re so attuned to each other’s playing and our right hand, so I can jump up a little more, perch right on top of the click, and play where he’s at, or he can kind of drag a little bit, just ever so slightly. We can see these things, too, when you record digitally. I don’t know how geeked out you want to get for your viewers whatever…”
Oh bless you… Geek out, please.
“Yeah! You can see these things on the grid, so we can see where we’re landing. And I mean, we can hear it; I hear it more than I see it, but Willie and I both have the capability to adjust our picking cadences and where we’re landing on the riff, to find that sweet spot where we are. These are minute adjustments, you know what I mean? But you can feel them as much as you can you can hear them.”
“But, in his default setting, Willie is spot on! And in my default setting, I am a little more of that ZZ Top kind of like Pantera thing where it’s just a little lazy on the beat, but that has kind of a strut, kind of a swagger to it. And I think that’s one of the strengths of the pairing of Willie and I is he is very abstracted with his left hand, with his note choice. He very often ignores scale sensibility or anything kind of like that.
Making records is its own art form, and it’s just sort of like this kaleidoscopic movement of fades and volumes, and players in and out. It’s really elaborate and fun.
“He does a lot of really odd chord voicings and really, really unique patterns that aren’t necessarily built on any kind of traditional cornerstone of pentatonic or natural minor or harmonic minor [scales], which is where I live. But then, his right hand is very, very precise, and mine’s a little more swaggy, a little more ham-fisted, a little bluesier.”
That’s the magic of the pocket. So long as your in it, you’re fine, and it can be loose but tight.
“And then there are times – very often – when we are writing songs together. So, in recording, you will sometimes listen to Lamb of God records and, all of a sudden, on the left and the right, you’re hearing me. And then in the next part, on the left and right, you might be hearing predominantly Willie on either side.
“A lot of times in recording, we will highlight those differences by featuring one guitar player at any given point more than the other, so it’s all this sliding scale. Making records is its own art form, and it’s just sort of like this kaleidoscopic movement of fades and volumes, and players in and out. It’s really elaborate and fun.”
What do you guys look for from your producer? You’ve worked with Josh Wilbur for so long now. But you’ve also been doing this so long you probably could produce yourself.
Josh Wilbur will keep you in the chair when you want to get out because he knows that you’re not playing your best, rather than let you give up
“Oh, well, I don’t know that we could produce ourselves. I mean, we could but I certainly don’t think we’d have the same results. Josh is so in tune with everyone’s strengths and the things that challenge everyone. And he can read the room very well, so he knows at any given point, like, who’s going to be more productive at one thing than another any day. So he’s very much a task manager. He’s very much a motivational speaker.
“He will keep you in the chair when you want to get out because he knows that you’re not playing your best, rather than let you give up. He just has this way of really creating an environment that gets our best performances. He’s a coach.”
One thing you said years and years ago, when Resolution came out, and it felt really true, was that you don’t play every day. How important is that? Because I think sometimes when you have a break from the instrument and come back fresh.
I’m a pretty simple guitar player, man. I play with a lot of feel. And I have a voice on the instrument. I feel confident in being able to say that; there’s a thing I do that sounds like me when I do it
“I think it depends on what you want, man. It depends on what you want out of the instrument. You know, I got to believe – and maybe I’m wrong – but I’ve got to believe cats like Jason Richardson, who’s just the shreddiest, like the fastest, blistering [player], I don’t know Jason very well, but I would imagine he plays every day or something close to it. Guthrie Govan probably plays every day. Maybe he doesn’t! I don’t know him either. [Laughs] But it just depends, like, what you want!
“I’m a pretty simple guitar player, man. I play with a lot of feel. And I have a voice on the instrument. I feel confident in being able to say that; there’s a thing I do that sounds like me when I do it. I’m not anybody’s best guitar player. I’m not the fastest, the most knowledgable, the shreddiest. I’m none of those things. But I play and it sounds like me, and that’s gonna happen whether I play every day or whether I play three times a week or whatever.”
“It’s gonna sound like me, because I've been playing for 40 years. And so, when I pick up the guitar, it tends to sound like me playing. I consider myself, more than anything, a songwriter, and I just happen to be a songwriter on guitar because that’s the instrument I play. I was speaking with a friend of mine. He plays in my solo band, Joe Harvett.
“He’s from Wales. He’s one of the best guitar players I’ve ever been in a room with. Absolutely bonkers good. Knows all the theory, went to school, jazz player, plays blues like nobody’s business, can just absolutely shred – an incredible player. And I was down on myself one day, and I was like, ‘Man, I don’t play enough. I don’t practise. I’m not drilling anything.’”
“And he’s the one that kind of got me on this. He was like, ‘Are you doing everything you want with the instrument? Are you able to say what you want to say? And do you feel held back by the instrument?’ And right now, I don’t.
“I feel like it’s more about finding what I want to say than it is not being able to say what I want to say. It’s more about determining what it is I want to say. So, that doesn’t mean I’ve arrived. It doesn’t mean I've mastered this thing. It just means that I think the guitar is so forgiving, and has such a wide range to it that you can have a guy that plays like Jason Richardson, or you can have a guy that plays like Freddie King, and it’s all still incredible to listen to.”
Absolutely, and that goes for everything. You have to let the musical idea guide whatever the technique needs to be to execute it, whether it’s two minutes of avant-garde noise or something beautiful and intricate.
“Yeah, it’s like, what does it make you feel? Does it make you feel something? So I don’t play every day. I played today!”
Yeah, well, sometimes you play and you feel like you got worse at it.
“[Laughs] I don’t know! Maybe, yeah, you have bad days. Yeah.”
Paul Gilbert was talking about how every time he performs, the first song, live, or in an album, it’s like the first song he needs to prove he can play guitar. Now, reframing this in a Lamb Of God context, do you feel compelled to put something that will, y’know, ignite the pit first?
“I think that’s you doing that, but that’s great. I think that’s great! Because it is! I mean, if you as a listener, that’s the first thing you’re hearing, and so setting the tone for you, okay, what’s this going to be?
“So we are very intentional about the track listing, the sequence of the tracks on any given album. But no, I mean, to your point, certainly not on record. I love that I feel like we don’t have to prove anything anymore – if ever we did, we certainly may be at times thought we did.”
“And that youthful sort of competitive streak, that kind of ambitious aggression, that served us. But 25 years into a career – well into my 50s – I don’t really have that sort of approach to much of anything anymore. I don’t want to have to prove or compete.
“I just want to do my best and be genuine and be passionate about the art I’m helping to make. And that feels really, really right, and really serene, and I feel very invested in that in a way that doesn’t have to feel so urgent or panicked.”
Yeah, just to get let yourself get carried away in the idea itself, you know, because that’s gnarly enough. Talking about Lamb of God as a punk band, Parasocial Christ, how does it when you play something like that?
“It’s just fun. It’s fun to play. It’s like an exploration of styles. If you were an artist, you’d call it a study – like a study in in hardcore. It’s just exploring different avenues of heavy music and seeing what it sounds like when we do that, and when we do that now versus when we did it that this other time. It’s really fun to play.”
And you’ve got so many possibilities open to you because Randy is such a great vocalist. Sepsis has got that sort of like early 2000s sort of industrial vibe, almost a Nick Cave vampiric quality.
“Yeah! Well, it’s a part of the process, so knowing there’s going to be a vocal on there, we carve out space for where that’s going to be, so that there’s room for melody if we want to put melody in. There’s room for implied melody. There’s room for a vocal cadence that complements whatever’s going on rhythmically in the song. All that stuff at this point in the game is is about leaving space in the room to be decorated.”
What else are we hearing on the record amps-wise.
“For my rhythm tracks, I used a Mesa/Boogie Badlander with the first generation Tube Screamer in front of it, with the drive rolled all the way down, so it just kind of tightens up that bottom end just a little bit in the gain structure.
“But the Tube Screamer’s not adding a lot of gain because it doesn’t need it. It just brought the sag up just a little bit in the bottom end. And for leads, I used a Boogie Mark IV with the Klon in front of it.”
You don’t need to overcomplicate it
“No. Now, there’s some other additional effects, reverbs and delays and stuff like that, but all that comes in post.
“It comes in [during] the mix, because it’s much easier to play with that stuff after you’ve printed a take than it is to commit it to a delay setting on a recording, and then find that it’s clashing or was something else, rhythmically or whatever, and then not be able to undo it because you printed it, you know what I mean?
“So all those kind of effects outside of tonal things, we will do outboard, we’ll do after the fact.”
Do you still own the Kurt Cobain-style Jaguar and did that make the record?
“No, I sold that a while back shortly after. There was a video of me and my daughter that went viral there, and I hadn’t been playing that guitar much since then and a collector really wanted it so I sold that guitar.”
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Fair enough. You were/are a huge Kurt Cobain fan. What did you take from him?
“What I liked about Nirvana was really just the songs. I think they had a pop sensibility about so many of the songs. My favourite Nirvana songs are the ones that are kind of the singles. I really like the songcraft around it. Tonally, it was it was fine, and power-wise, I was more into Soundgarden, and that kind of thing, but I just really liked the melody and the sound of Kurt’s voice when he sang intentionally.
“And it was just a really cool band. I was the perfect age for that. I had heard Bleach before Nevermind came out, and I liked it, but it wasn’t like my favourite record by any stretch.
“But there was something that happened in the world when Nevermind hit MTV and it just exploded. It was it was such a huge cultural moment. It was hard not to get swept up in it and enjoy it. And I did.”
As Krist Novoselic said, it was children’s songs set to punk.
“Yeah. Very nursery rhyme-y. A very, very cool pop sensibility, really. I feel like the strongest parts of Nirvana were the melody and the songcraft.”
Do you think culture is a bit too atomised to have such a unifying moment for popular rock music?
“I mean, certainly in terms of its impact on culture. It just depends what your metric is.
The Black Album really changed a whole genre of music, and then there are so many hip-hop records we could talk about, too. So, I don’t know. I guess it’s all perspective, but the Nirvana thing was certainly a big moment and I think is probably easy to forget for people these days just how big a wave that was.”
You mention hip-hop, is that an influence on how Lamb Of God approaches rhythm, particularly with Randy’s vocals. Hip-hop producers similarly play fast and loose with that pocket, and how behind they can be
Where a rock band or an indie rock or whatever might prioritise melody, we're prioritising the pattern and the percussion of the vocal
“Hip-hop, from a production standpoint, a lot of times the vocal is nudged back on the beat, right? And just, again, that sort of pocket, finding that pocket, and having that be a little bit behind the beat – the beat is leading it – and so it makes the vocal pattern feel almost more conversational and a little lazier on the beat, and that has this sort of psychological effect.
“I don’t know that that’s why I play the way I play. I think I play the way I play largely because I’m just influenced by a lot of blues players who just, that’s part of that swag, too. So there’s just something cool about being a little behind and sounding a little a little less nervous and a little more laid back.
“We pay a lot of attention to the pattern and the rhythm and the cadence of the vocal. Where a rock band or an indie rock or whatever might prioritise melody, we're prioritising the pattern and the percussion of the vocal, which is, you know, also the case in hip-hop.”
- Into Oblivion is out now via Century Media.
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