So I read the thread about Warbringer here lately, was moved by the discussion. Thought back on early band days, and I must say it's kind of humbling that people are talking about my band's records in these comparative terms the way I used to argue with my bandmates and metal friends about which Slayer album rules the most, or something of that nature. I'm gonna be turning 30 this year, I started Warbringer when I was 18, it's very near and dear to me.I began writing this bit on the albums in the other thread when it became this long self-examination piece. See if you find it interesting-
WAR WITHOUT END
I have absolutely no musical background before Warbringer, it is my first and only band (Zombie runs parallel to Warbringer, had Adam Carroll and Ryan Bates). Never sang, never played an instrument, dance? Not a chance. Born of the Ruins I think was the fourth song I had ever taken part in writing, Total War was about 6th or 7th. For the early-era Warbringer songs, Laux brought the riffs and I brought the structures/words/ideas. It was really new for both of us, but we never played covers, we just started writing songs from square one. Everything I know about being a singer or music or being in a band I've learned just from jumping in and doing it (thank god there are no super-early recordings of us in circulation). Adam was our drummer for a while before he switched to guitar, and he got incorporated into the songwriting on stuff like At the Crack of Doom and Combat Shock, the later material we made for War Without End, which was written over the whole early period of the band pre-record deal. I have fond memories of this time, jamming in Laux's garage and Ryan Bates' dad's auto shop til crazy hours in the morning in our constant quest to be a sweet band.
We got signed so fast, maybe just over a year after playing our first show we were already being approached. It was kind of crazy and I was really young, when we found we were gonna have a record deal I believe I was still 19. In retrospect I wish we'd had more time for us to, well, exist before recording that record. I hear a lot of bad spots on my own vocals, I sound very young to my own ears now, and my timing/rhythm was weak. There's some cheeseball stock rhymes that I wouldn't be caught dead writing today. And yeah, the drums are sloppy.
That being said, I think this record serves as a pretty strong starting point. At least it's rooted in really fast thrash, which is one of my great passions in life. We were more a speed/power band upon initial conception, I wasn't sold on harsh vocals yet, I wanted to sing more Manowar style at first (my god it was awful). It took finding out about stuff like
Pleasure to Kill and
Darkness Descends, and from Metal-Archives no less, to change the approach- the rapid fire bark came far more quickly and naturally to me. Also a discovery I made while singing and driving recklessly in my car- Though Eric Adams and Halford falsettos might be out of my reach, I can do some warped version of that high scream from
Forward to Termination pretty goddamn loud. ("Cyanide" third chorus I often use as pre-show warmup still) It sounds like someone lit a dude on fire. Cool. Then we wrote "Total War", where the basic concept before writing was "Play as fast as possible, then stop and scream Total War", saw it was much better than our existing previous songs, and from then on the basic concept of our band became "Warbringer is a band that will rip your fucking head off."
This record has, and still receives intense criticism for being sloppy, derivative and offering nothing original to the realm of music... for me this always kind of stung. I really put my heart into this, and therefore didn't go off to a university, and disappointed my family immensely by making the choice to be in a metal band. With the touring schedule of early Warbringer it was basically the >only< thing in my life for many years. I've never worked as hard on anything else. I certainly see the limitations of this record, and I do see it as a starting point. That being said, this is a record written by 19-year olds, and it starts with Total War and ends with Combat Shock. I feel like I have a voice that is easily identifiable, even when compared with my most direct influences (Petrozza, Araya, Steve Reynolds, Rob Urbanati are some top choices for me). The first Warbringer album is also an extremely pure strain of fast thrash metal, and I love that we come from that because the roots of the band are dug firmly with the ideas of blistering speed and aggression.
Never got the metalcore vocalist comparison, I've seen/heard that a few times. If anything I was just a pretty inexperienced/undisciplined vocalist. Never liked metalcore at all myself, was always pretty against it.
At the Crack of Doom is an interesting one here cause we used a blast beat and a black metal riff for the main theme of the song, which was pretty unusual for "new wave of thrash" bands of the time, and there's nothing else like it on the record. It was one of the last ones we wrote on War Without End. I think as soon as we realized the new wave of thrash was becoming a thing, we were already beginning to try to differentiate ourselves. We started to resent some of the ridiculously close-minded attitudes we saw in the scene we were a part of, how it can become anti-creativity, which just sucks. We also started to resent some of the "goofy" approach taken by a lot of other bands in the field... because it's just not the best direction for things, I think. The best "funny" song tops out at like a 7 or 8, and a joke can only be funny so many times. Serious ones can go to 10, and can last forever. These attitudes and some of the ultra-negative reaction War Without End received certainly helped fuel the next record.
I think the answer we came up with, for how to differentiate ourselves from the sudden influx of hi-tops was- to try to make some kind of lethal hybrid strain of super-thrash. I want to make something that is definitely thrash fucking metal, but I don't want it to be superfluous and disposable. I want it to have value. That means we have to be pretty damn clever, because there are some incredible, groundbreaking classic albums in this style. Our basic design philosophy was to distill the elements we most loved from what we saw the be the absolute best of thrash metal, and to do a little DNA splicing with other styles of music (death metal, black metal, heavy metal, bit of hard rock, some prog) that we love as well, so as to avoid using too much from the same bag of tricks. Also, we think that for aggressive blazing fast music, you need to focus harder and write better than usual to get hooks and memorability in the songs. Enunciation is important, words can have power. Lastly, I think a lot of classic-era thrash songs, especially in the late 80s/early 90s era, are too fucking long and the blazing speed can be a wearing-out rather than an adrenaline rush if held for too long without significant variation. We try to make Warbringer songs overall tend to move quick between parts/sections and avoid things like third identical verses and choruses, and trying to always have a little variant on things in place. This is all stuff we were starting to establish during the recording/touring cycle for the first record, the second and third records are really the results of this line of thinking we had. Later records I started approaching lyrics to songs as these kind of self-contained concept pieces, each with their own theme and setting, but at this time I hadn't gotten there yet.
War Without End to me serves as the starting point for my journey with music, that has now gone on over 10 years. I have a strange love/hate relationship with this record. It's definitely not our best one, people who say that- Gotta say, I think you guys are straight up wrong. We improved from here in so many ways as a band. I think the main appeal I find in it is that we are clearly a raw, undeveloped band, but we are going as completely all-out as we possibly could.
If anyone has any questions would be glad to answer!