The Daily Procrastinator

Here at The Daily Procrastinator, we know that those hours between 8:00 and 5:00 can be a real bore. Staring at the stack of papers on your desk or avoiding the list of tasks your manager expects you to accomplish can be stressful, exhausting business. For your benefit, procrastinator, we published a series of tantalizing and time-consuming articles this week. In case you missed any of them, here’s a list of the topics we covered:

Office Life: TallGirl commented on the interesting variety of spam email she receives, as well as her continuing love affair with paper in a world which is supposedly becoming a paperless utopia.

Music: Addressing both ends of the musical spectrum, Juggernaut offered his thoughts about Lamb Of God’s new album, Wrath, while BigRedPoet celebrated the White House’s decision to award Stevie Wonder the Gershwin Award. FlashCap added to this week’s celebration of music with his Sonnet To Sirius and XM Radio.

Obscure Vocabulary: If you can’t use the word “amanuensis” in a sentence, take heart! TallGirl couldn’t use it either, until just the other day. That’s uh-MAN-yoo-EN-sis, by the way.

Sports: Although Terrell Owens’ unemployment was short-lived, it was still the highlight of BigRedPoet’s month.

Medicine and/or PseudoScience: Do nutritional supplements and herbal remedies actually help people avoid getting sick? TallGirl is 97% sure they don’t, but she uses them anyway. Why?

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LAMB OF GOD - WRATH

I am a huge fan of thrash metal.  There is just something about it that grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go.  The best metal of this sort has a “groove”:  riffs to kill for keeping time with hellaciously fast blastbeats, riding cymbals, and a pounding bass.   Back in the mid- to late 80s, there existed a sort of glory days of thrash.  This was exemplified by the four pillars of the genre (Anthrax, Slayer, Megadeth, and old Metallica) coupled with the “newcomers” Pantera.  Go ahead and throw in Prong (particularly Beg to Differ) and Testament as a couple of other favorites.

Lamb of God is today’s undisputed leader of the genre and is leading a renaissance of thrash.  Sure, Slayer and Metallica get the Grammys, but that is just a case of  name recognition on the part of the voters.  I was first turned on to LoG after hearing “Laid to Rest” from their album Ashes of the Wake, which was the first album I’d bought in a long time that simply ripped my face off.   And while I was never a huge fan of the “cookie monster”-style of vocal stylings, LoG just made it work for me.   Their follow-up, Sacrament, became a drop-date purchase for me, and it continued to impress.

But both albums have been eclipsed by the triumph that is Wrath.

Where do these guys get all of these wonderful riffs?  Seriously, if you don’t find yourself involuntarily headbanging during the bridge of “Dead Seeds,” you have no metal in your soul.   High points (as if there were low points) include “Set to Fail”, “Contractor” and “Choke Sermon”.    But my personal favorite is the closer, “Reclamation”:  the blues-based lick that provides the structure and, simply put, drive of this song is perfectly pieced together.  It is the juggernaut of the album.

Wrath is now the front-runner for album of the year.  It will be interesting to see what other bands are willing to put out this year in the face of this onslaught.