Warbringer is a band that uses elbow grease: Screamer John Kevill and crew work hard, make forceful records, and tour enough to symbolically qualify as vagrants. But with less reliance on modern music marketing — and its shrieking tone, nagging omnipresence, and sweaty odor — how does a no-nonsense act like Warbringer find purchase on the sheer cliff face of success? It helps that their three albums create a Warbringer world, with listener-orienting devices like common track order schemes (think Metallica’s second, third, and fourth albums), common art design (twice with tattoo-able art by Dan Seagrave), and common title phonetics (War, Waking, Worlds). It helps also that Warbringer’s band personality is totally eyeroll-proof, just the shared vibe of five cool metal fans in cool metal t-shirts being cool and metal just like you.

And Kevill exemplified that friendly, frank chillness in a chat with MetalSucks this week — after which we just gabbed about general metal for an equal amount of time — as he discussed new album Worlds Torn Asunder, Warbringer’s first non-traditional producer choice, their new drummer’s attention to the three P’s, and keeping his band totally metal. Trends die, but there’s always an audience for the real. That’s Warbringer.

Click to read more…

Warbringer are streaming a new song, “Living Weapon,” on Hails and Horns, and I gotta say, literally within seconds of it beginning, I liked it a million times better than anything from Waking Into Nightmares. In fact, I think I liked it better than anything I’ve heard the band do since One by One, The Wicked Fall, their free EP that we were giving away back in the early days of MetalSucks.

Now, is the song ACTUALLY better than anything the band has recorded in several years, or am I just over  being over  the whole rethrash thing? It seems like the band was playing here in New York once a month for awhile there, and, honestly, it started to feel like overkill after awhile — so maybe the fact that I haven’t actually seen them in at least a year is helping my opinion of the music. But both the riffs and John Kevill’s vocal performance sound a lot more vicious to me than the material on their last couple of albums. But I dunno, maybe this is just the cloud of jadedness lifting.

ANYWAY, check out the track here, then debate its quality in our comments section. Warbringer’s latest offering, Worlds Torn Asunder, comes out September 27 on Century Media. The band will follow its release with a North American headlining run, natch; Lazarus A.D., Landmine Marathon, and Diamond Plate are playing support. Get dates here.

-AR

When people talk about neo-thrash bands like Warbringer, their words usually carry a subtle hint of disdain. I concede that it’s hard not to mention what they are (neo-Bay Area Thrash) before saying how good they are (very). But to brand Warbringer (or Municipal Waste) fetishizers of a bygone era implies something vaguely untrustable, beyond a mere affection for the Thrash idiom. And it’s true, there’s little about Warbringer that suggests an original vision. All the same, their debut full-length War Without End and now the Gary Holt-produced Waking Into Nightmares are too awesome to be the creation of some tribute band; it’s simply not possible that Warbringer is comprised of five masters of mimicry. Rather, it’s clear they feel that Bay Area-native bands did shit right. And now they do.

Click to read more…