Lamb of God

Chris Adler , drummer for Lamb of God, cheerfully admits that he and his bandmates are addicted to Guitar Hero, the video game that allows its players to live out their fantasies of being fretboard kings. But when the recently released Guitar Hero II featured the metal band's "Laid to Rest ," the musicians discovered that five plastic buttons can be just as intimidating as six steel strings.

"In fact, it was really funny," says Adler of watching guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler having so much trouble with one of their own songs, which happened to be one of the most difficult on the game. "If you're a first-time player, regardless of what song it is, you're just kind of fumbling around. But to see these guys play one of the hardest songs on there and just totally destroying it was hilarious."

Luckily for Lamb of God (bassist John Campbell and vocalist Randy Blythe fill out the lineup), the guitarists bring a higher level of dexterity to the real thing. Like Pantera with a booster shot of speed, ferocity, and complexity, the Richmond, Va., band has climbed its way to the forefront of the heavy metal scene. Hard rock magazine Revolver named the group's fourth studio release, "Sacrament ," the 2006 album of the year, while the members have been widely praised by musician publications such as Modern Drummer and Guitar Player.

But Lamb of God is slowly nudging its way into the mainstream as well. "Sacrament" hit No. 8 on the Billboard 200 chart in its first week and was named the 20th best album of 2006 by Blender. The song "Redneck" was nominated for a best metal performance Grammy. (The band lost to onetime tourmates Slayer.) And just over a month ago, the band played "Pathetic" on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," bringing thrash metal into bedrooms at a time when people are usually about to go to sleep.

Other metal bands are making similar inroads. Mastodon played "Conan" last November, and recent albums by Slayer and the Deftones have also hit the Billboard Top 10. But that level of success and visibility is still fairly rare for heavy bands that lack the strong prog component seen in groups such as Tool and System of a Down. For the most part, pure metal remains an outcast genre.

So it's all the more impressive that Lamb of God is starting to make its presence known everywhere these days. Except Boston. The closest stop on the current tour is Providence (where the band plays Wednesday before heading to New York). Adler insists this is no slight: "Some of the best bands in metal are coming out of there right now. You've got Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, Unearth, all those guys.

"It's funny that you're surrounded by two of the bigger shows, but one of the ideas of this tour was to not really play major markets, or at least stay away from the ones that we have been hitting pretty often over the past couple years," he says. "Not because they don't deserve it and not because we don't want to go, but because we really wanted to spend time -- like today in Kansas City or yesterday in Tulsa, Okla. -- in places we haven't been in four or five years."

The band was last in Boston in September as part of the Gigantour with Megadeth. It was the second major metal tour that they headlined or coheadlined, after 2005's Sounds of the Underground. Faced in both cases with the pressure of capping off an entire day's worth of bands, Lamb of God saw specific challenges and opportunities in each crowd.

"[The tours] were very similar in that we didn't necessarily expect it to be a Lamb of God-only audience," Adler says. "In Sounds of the Underground, we proved that we can cross over and do a little bit of everything that everybody out there is doing. And on the Gigantour, I think we proved to these people that had somewhat given up on metal that there's people out there today that are still bringing back that old-school feel and doing some real cool stuff."

That "old-school feel" helps to feed into the band's description of its music as "pure American metal." Its members first started playing together in the early 1990s as Burn the Priest (the name was changed to Lamb of God when the band signed to Epic Records in 1999). They sought out inspiration from West Coast thrash bands such as Testament and Forbidden at a time when European heavy metal bands began dominating the scene. The resulting sound made the band a formidable live act -- the "Killadelphia" concert DVD has been certified gold -- and drew the attention of Ted Lange of software company Red-Octane , who headed the music selection committee for Guitar Hero II.

"It's always hard for us to find more modern bands," says Lange. "There's a lot of music out there nowadays, the emo stuff, that a lot of fans of the game . . . don't want to see in [it]. But Lamb of God was definitely one of the bands that we heard an outcry [about] that was a huge modern band, really big in the metal scene, that we definitely took a listen to. 'Laid to Rest' was one of their biggest hits, and after quite a few listens . . . it was just kind of the obvious choice for us."

Even with the raised profile that comes with Lamb of God's presence on a successful videogame franchise or at the Grammy Awards, Adler views his success as validation not just for his own band but for the entire metal genre. "Taking bands like us on 'Conan O'Brien,' I think that's just a great time for heavy metal and for how far it's come," he says. "I don't mean to sing my own praises by that. I'm looking forward to what's to come."