Author: Rok Klemše
Location: Gala hala, Ljubljana
Concert date: 21.02.2010
Attendance: 0
We caught the American thrash metal outfit Warbringer at the last Metalcamp, where they made a great impression on the small stage. We wanted more, and Dirty Skunks brought the war straight out of the trenches and onto the stage of Gala hala.
The war march rang out with the Carinthian pack Wartune. Sadly, this excellent technical thrash/death metal band always has the bad luck of playing super early in Ljubljana, when the soldiers are still sharpening their bayonets, but the guys had a strategy and tactics ready for the coming assault.
Eruption put on camo paint this time and played as “Waruption” – and delivered one of their best gigs ever. Instrumentally they carried out the attack without a slip, only at the start Rja’s guitar didn’t quite get the right kick, but the sound was quickly fixed and Eruption fired up just the way they should. The wreckers off the album sounded fresh and seriously energetic, Rja and Tim soloed like it was nothing, a proper mosh war broke out below the stage, and Buco belted out probably one of his better vocal performances, with the clean vocals sounding especially great. Luckily Eruption aren’t resting on their laurels, as they introduced a new track, Selfcaged, which promises the follow-up to Lifeless Paradise will be even better, because the new song thoroughly got the necks moving. On top of all that, the guys served up a fantastically played Forbidden classic, Through Eyes of Glass. High five!
When Eruption had swept the spent shells off the stage, the Croatians War-Head lit the flames on the flamethrowers. The Osijek crew released their debut No Signs of Armageddon a little under two years ago, mixed by Collin Davis (Vile). The guys should have played here already, but it didn’t work out back then, though they made up for the absence with a very good first show here. In three quarters of an hour War-Head played a few songs off the album, rooted in the aggressive, raw and primitive thrash of the German school. Even though they played energetically, confidently and uncompromisingly, toward the end it all got a bit monotonous – I’d have liked at least a few more dynamic riffs and varied guitar lines and solos. But they finished off nicely by killing it with War-Head and 1000 Eyes. And War-Head are still damn good heralds of the apocalypse!
Then out of the silence of the night the howling of jackals finally rang out, and the long-awaited Americans from the Californian town of Ventura, Warbringer, blew onto the stage. The guys greeted us with the opener from their current album, Waking Into Nightmares, and the very second it kicked off, war broke out below the stage. And not a positional war, not a strategic and tactical one, but a real total war, aimed at destroying and mowing down everything in front of it. From the first track to the last, Warbringer rained bursts of gunfire and bombs from the stage, and the helicopters flooded Gala hala with napalm in the style of the opening of Apocalypse Now! Warbringer acted like they couldn’t care less about the casualties, guitarists John Laux and Adam Carroll just swapped magazines and stormed off into the next charge, and after presenting songs from their second record the guys went back to the debut, War Without End, packed with war wreckers. That’s when hell really opened up, and its legions were commanded by the rabid John Kevill. What a frontman! Incredibly charismatic with a great stage presence, good banter between songs, pure thrasher energy that Paul Baloff must have laid in his cradle, and most importantly, a perfectly sick, venomous and aggressive thrash vocal – on stage Kevill comes across like the metal version of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Kubrick’s cult Full Metal Jacket! Total War, Severed Reality, Combat Shock, Systematic Genocide live, even more than on record, prove that Warbringer are without a doubt one of the best (if not the best) of the new thrash metal bands that have sprung up like mushrooms over the last few years, but the Warbringers leave all their competitors behind in the tank exhaust and the blast wave. And when the time comes for the end of the world, as humanity tumbles into the chasm of doom, Warbringer will be playing in Satan’s honor. Warbringer laid Gala hala to waste and razed it to the ground… afterward all you could hear was the moaning of the dying, bodies were piled up in heaps, radiation was destroying even the Geiger counters, the post-apocalypse had arrived. All of that is a Warbringer concert – “Total Waaaaar!!!”
Oh yeah, Affliction crapped themselves behind the front line, heh.
Photos: Martin Prezelj
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