Randy Blythe, frontman of Lamb of God, lies on the pavement in Glasgow, unconscious.
He’s sprawled out wearing a kilt. Moments earlier, he'd been drunk and belligerently taunting his bandmate Mark Morton on the street outside the tour bus. Morton – quieter, but no less volatile after weeks crammed in a van – punched the frontman out cold.
The haunting opening notes to “Vigil” play as Randy is picked up and a lit cigarette thrust into his mouth.
The image fades.
3,500 miles away, in Philadelphia, the frontman’s silhouette rises again from the obscurity.
We can just about make out the words “Fuck Subtlety” on his t-shirt.
Tension builds as John Campbell’s bass rumbles ominously in the background.
This tension is shattered when Randy screams over the clean notes:
“Our father thy will be done”
A bastardised version of the Lord’s prayer. Fuck subtlety indeed. The room quakes beneath the rumbling, sludgy riff that follows his scream.
These scenes are from the Killadelphia DVD. Live footage from Philadelphia interspersed with footage from the road.
I was thirteen when I watched this. Even then it was ugly. Two musicians I revered – drunk on 12-year-old whisky and broken from weeks of touring – scrapping on a Scottish street.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
“Vigil” is the closing track on Lamb of God’s “official” second album, As the Palaces Burn.
The album was released on May 6, 2003.
Five days before its release, George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit, a banner reading "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" stretched behind him.
Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Baghdad had fallen on April 9. The invasion had launched just six weeks prior.
The aptly titled As The Palaces Burn landed in the middle of this chaos.
The timing doesn’t feel coincidental. In 2004, Blythe told a journalist: “We have got to get that monkey [George Bush] out of the office before he kills us all.”
Chris Adler, a founding member of the band and its drummer until 2019, put it more bluntly in interviews for the reissue of As The Palaces Burn. He described the record as an unflinching response to the post-9/11 political landscape, adding that the band felt it would've been irresponsible not to speak their minds.
On the Palaces record, “Vigil” follows "Blood Junkie", an explicit takedown of Bush (the metaphors are “paper-thin”, to use Blythe’s words):
“A shallow little jackal of a man posing as a hawk.
Conniving opportunist
Lease the blade the gun the bomb in the name of justice.
A violent panacea for what ails the nation”
So, as the final statement on the record, "Vigil" carries the weight of everything that came before it.
The Sound & The Fury
The band recorded Palaces in 22 days at Montana, Inc. Studios in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Devin Townsend, the visionary frontman of Strapping Young Lad, flew in to produce.
Adler's drums were done in two days. Vocals took four. The remaining 16 days were, in Chris Adler's words, “a whole lotta guitars.” He described it as brutal – bandmates on the verge of tears – because the songs pushed the band to the edge of their technical ability.
Both Morton and Willie Adler ran Mesa/Boogie Mark IVs – the amp that defined Lamb of God's tone throughout the early 2000s.
Most of the songs are written in Drop D (with “Vigil” being an exception in “double drop-D” tuning). The tunings were not as low as their contemporaries, which is part of what gives them that distinctive tightness (and surprising heaviness!)
Devin Townsend’s production stirred up controversy. On the As The Palaces Burn documentary, John Campbell jokes that:
“One of the great things about Palaces is the terrible production. And if you try and listen to it on an iPhone with their tiny speakers you can’t hear what the fuck is happening.”
Despite the controversial production, what is clear is that Townsend pushed the band past their own capabilities at the time.
As the record became faster, tighter, more technically precise, the musicians developed a better sense of just how proficient they could be. Chris Adler’s legs “burned” trying to keep pace with the click, and Devin hovered over the guitarists, making them perform take after take until – finally – they achieved the sounds he was looking for.
“There was one session where Devin was pushing Willie so hard, I remember him [Willie] coming out of the room and, kind of, almost tearing up to the point where he was so frustrated that he knew what Devin wanted because it was right, but he was having such a hard time nailing that part. And that’s, to me, the guy you need, right? The guy that’s gonna take you over your own mountain and, you know, help you pull out the best of yourself.”
Campbell said Townsend, “ took us from dudes that were partying and rocking to…”
“…dudes that were partying, rocking and focusing incredibly on playing, exactly right, every note we had written.”
"Vigil" opens with a clean guitar riff in D minor – one of the first times Lamb of God had used clean tones on record. It's a departure that hints at the more experimental songwriting to come on later albums ("Grace”, “Overlord”...)
But don't mistake “subtlety” for softness. That clean tone is still running through a Mesa/Boogie amp. The warmth is temporary… It’s not long before Campbell’s ominous bass creeps in beneath, raising the tension.
The tension keeps rising until it’s finally shattered by Blythe's scream: "Our father, thy will be done."
The first heavy riff is slow. Doomy. Sabbath-y. More resonant of the stoner-doom bands from the late '90s than of the contemporary metalcore scene.
There’s a moment in the song where the music seems to fade. It’s almost a relief. By this point in the album, the listener feels spent. Done.
But it's not over yet.
What follows is “pure” Lamb of God: discordant, jarring chords slicing through thicker, sludgier walls of sound.
A fast, technical riff emerges from the silence, pivoting off the low, open D string. Chris Adler's full arsenal is on display: double bass, fills that are “catchy” in the way only a rhythm section built on a fraternal bond can produce (think Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul Abbott.) You can almost hear Chris straining to drive the tempo toward the song’s final, unresolved statement.
“Smite the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered”
While the meaning of the song is intentionally ambiguous, the lyrics and political context offer a map.
The song opens by invoking the Lord's Prayer – before immediately subverting it.
"Our father, thy will be done" becomes "Our father, we forsake you."
It’s an anti-prayer. A formal rejection of authority dressed in the cadence of scripture. Mark Morton, who calls himself the song's “director” as much as writer, tells us in the Palaces documentary that the song is directed at two different evils – Bush’s foreign policy, as well as the Catholic sex scandals being uncovered at the time.
A vigil, in the Catholic sense, is an anticipatory watch (often kept over the dead or dying.) But this vigil isn't passive:
"This vigil burns until the day our fires overtake you."
We’re turning our grief into an active force for rebellion, fanning the flames until they’re big enough to consume the structures that (mis)govern us.
This is where the song’s false ending comes into play. It sounds like the rage is over, that the vigil has burned out. But it hasn't.
The song – and the fire – erupts into something more violent as Blythe screams: "I defy you to continue."
The political reading is obvious. “Vigil” is the result of a citizen watching a country start a war on false pretences and wishing the whole rotten structure would collapse so something better could grow:
“Ask me why I hate
Why I've prayed to see the nation that I loved disintegrate”
So no, this isn't abstract theology. The song was written and recorded while American bombs were literally falling on Baghdad. It’s a targeted attack on the diseased political structures that send men and women abroad to kill innocent people in a performative “War on Terror”.
The final line is ripped directly from Zechariah 13:7:
"Smite the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.”
In its biblical context, this is a prophecy about the crucifixion – God commanding the striking down of the shepherd so the flock will scatter.
But in Blythe's mouth, it's again inverted.
The shepherd is the authority figure the entire song has been raging against… the government, the church. The command is no longer a lament. It’s a call to action:
Remove the leader, and the blind followers scatter.
More than 20 years later, with the world no less fractured, "Vigil" doesn't feel like a relic of the Bush era. It feels desperately relevant.
The shepherds change. But the sheep remain.
Which means this vigil still burns.
Enjoyed this issue? I sure as heck enjoyed writing it.
Got any other stories from that record? Hit reply and let me know.
Until next time…
Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media