Released: May 10, 2024 on High Roller Records
Production: Jimmy Waldo, Giles Lavery
Length: 56:30
Genre: US Prog/Power
“Prog Power for the Melancholics”
The tragicomedy “The Warlord” goes something like this:
Two descendants of Greek immigrants with delusions of grandeur, let’s call them Mark and Bill, start a band in California called Warlord. Right in the middle of the glam revolution, the band plays an extremely melancholic brand of power prog metal with Christian undertones in the lyrics. They put out an EP, and soon after an LP (mostly re-recorded EP tracks plus a couple of new ones). Since the band is, in Bill’s and Mark’s heads, far more grandiose than the lowbrow glam crowd and operates on a much bigger canvas, there’s obviously no way it’s racking up gigging mileage in the grimy clubs of the Sunset Strip. Instead, the band rents a decommissioned theater and plays a fake concert there with no audience. They release the thing 13 years later, when of course nobody cares anymore. From the ten songs they managed to write by then, they put out two more compilations, one of them even called “Best of Warlord“, and then the band falls apart. Bill founds the ultra-Christian band Lordian Guard with his wife, the very reason he dissolved Warlord, while Mark goes off to play drums for Fates Warning.
After that a lot happens: the band happily reworks, overdubs, remixes, remasters, expands, records with guest singers (Joacim Cans of HammerFall) and keeps flipping more or less the same ten songs. The albums released over the following decades somehow slipped past my watchful ears.
Then this year the newest album, Free Spirit Soar, starts popping up in the recommendations on my favorite internet music channel. I resisted for a while, but then – why not – I gave it a few spins and quickly realized it slots right into the place of the missing successor to the LP … And the Cannons of Destruction Has Begun from 1984. Sound-wise, lyrically and musically. Kein Problem, ja?
I should mention that in 2021 the aforementioned Bill, guitarist William Tsamis, passed away. You’d have expected the band to call it quits without one of its leaders. But no, Mark decided to build one more album out of old Bill recordings, a few forgotten Lordian Guard songs and a new lineup. From what I read, all the guitar parts are restored Bill recordings, with only a few embellishments added by new guitarist Eric Juris.
The EP Deliver Us from 1983 and the aforementioned LP were in heavy rotation in my cassette player sometime in the late eighties, and I was a pretty big fan of both, even though I knew very little about the band itself. As I said, the album with Joacim on vocals (Ashes To Ashes from 2002, the year they played their first official concert at Wacken Open Air) went unnoticed past my ears, and so did all the ones that followed.
The production, handled by singer Giles and bassist Philip, perfectly captures the murky, half-amateur sound that dominated the Warlord recordings in the eighties. The melancholic and ominous melodies are back, a touch of Euro power metal peeks out here and there (Conquerors, the title track), and it’s full of despair and gloom. Singer Giles does a great job, fitting his vocals precisely to the atmosphere of the songs. Vocalists were always a side matter in Warlord, and Bill repeatedly said that in his musical vocabulary they’re expendable. I won’t go on too much about the individual musicians: Mark is of course a beast behind the drums, and Bill’s phrasing and soloing are a one-of-a-kind thing in the world of serious heavy metal anyway. Worth noting that the keyboards are much more upfront than on the original first releases, and often even drown out the guitar in the lead melodies.
The album keeps the listener in a chokehold for almost a full hour, with top-quality tracks following one another. Maybe I miss a proper dirge in the style of Soliloquy from the first LP, but you can’t have everything, right?
I doubt the band will win any new fans with this album, but for guys like me it’s a trip back in time on a cozy steam train, where the clickety-clack of the rails is replaced by Mark’s precise percussion.
Melancholic, astral, masterful and vintage.
Sweet treats: Pretty much every track, I’d say.
I’ll skip the rating this time, because this album has to be listened to from a certain time perspective, and a retro sound like this just can’t be properly and fairly rated in the year of our Lord 2024. What I will definitely do is give all the albums in between another listen, to see whether they’re really as lousy as they seemed to me when they came out.
Author: Igorac
Track list:
1. Behold a Pale Horse
2. The Rider
3. Conquerors
4. Worms of the Earth
5. The Watchman (bonus track)
6. Free Spirit Soar
7. The Bell Tolls
8. Alarm
9. Twin (bonus)
10. Revelation XIX
Musicians:
Mark Zonder – Drums
Philip Bynoe – Bass
Eric Juris – Guitars
Jimmy Waldo – Keyboards
Giles Lavery – Vocals
Technical crew:
Velio Josto – Cover art
Patrick W. Engel – Mastering
Andre Turoff – Design
Riccardo Demarosi – Mixing
Jimmy Waldo – Production
Giles Lavery – Production
