WARLORD - And The Cannons Of Destruction Have Begun... (1984)

Just because I pretend to be on a first name basis with band members, the people I'm discussing here and their nicknames that they used in the '80s are William Tsamis [Destroyer] on guitar, Mark Zonder [Thunderchild] on drums, Dave Waltry [Archangel] on bass, Diane Kornarens [Sentinel] on keys, and Rick Cunningham [Damien King II] on vocals.  Spoiler alert: Every member is on fire, captivating in isolation but masterful together.  I think Bill basically wrote everything and that he and maybe Mark kinda stood over everyone's shoulders telling them exactly what to play, but however it came together, ridiculous amount of skill on this record.

Track One:  "Beginning / Lucifer's Hammer"

I'm glad that, unlike the original release, my streaming service actually separates the interstitials like "Beginning" into their own tracks.  Because I for one do not want to have to get through this ponderous spoken word bullshit thing every time I want to listen to "Lucifer's Hammer."

Getting into the song proper, classic metal groove, but not quite classic metal.  There's an echo on Rick's voice that makes it sound a little cavernous and eerie when "with the push of a button, we all will go to Hell" (the song seems to be about nuclear war, not Satan*).  Mark isn't exactly going hyper-speed on the drums, but it's like he's keeping a beat while also playing a fill between every note, just to keep things lively.  And then a short keyboard solo abruptly enters and drops out just as quickly, so as to ensure that this doesn't sound quite like anything else.  Just when the song seems to have used all its tricks it resolves into the "save us from ourselves" outro.  I wish the chorus were a little stronger, but still a really nice track to introduce Warlord's different faces to the world (for this record, but also an earlier version of "Lucifer's Hammer" on a Metal Massacre compilation album was their first ever release, as far as I know).

Track Two:  "Lost And Lonely Days"

This time Bill and Diane are playing a riff that makes chords between themselves for texture - they're a great pair - while Dave drives the song a little.  Meanwhile, Rick finds the bottom note of the same chord as the perfect peasant place to put his voice.  I really like how this sounds.  When I hear the keyboard notes setting up the drum fills, it sounds very '80s rock radio, but the playing (especially Mark, as usual), is too intricate for this to read as just a simple pop-rock song.  The transitions between parts are too smooth for this to read as just a showcase in metal virtuosity.  It's more Warlord taking a go at an unabashed pop song... their way.

When I say that nobody listens to metal for the lyrics, despite the fact that I clearly do pay attention to the latter, I'm talking about the fact that I notice that LALD has some of the worst I've ever heard (and the competition there is fierce), and I don't really care.**

Track Three:  "Black Mass"

Classic stuff.  I think I'd pick "Black Mass" as my exemplar for how heavy Warlord can sound without being, you know, actually that heavy.  From a compositional standpoint, every choice seems to land.  The tempo is slow yet contains so many notes to punch it up and give it some brawn.  The vocals once again sit in a perfect pocket between the guitar and the bass, to strain upward at pivotal moments to convey enormity.  Even the details are right.  I love the echoed whispered vocals.  Rick goes up a few notes at the end of exactly the right beats.  They save the "the black mass!" post-chorus declaration for the end of the song, as is right.   Mark saves the cymbal hits for the very end after barely using them all song.  Is this song great because of the individual elements when I pick it apart, or is it more just that I find this melody irresistable?  Yes and yes.  How are such young songwriters assembling songs this exquisitely?

I think the solo here highlights how despite all the extra notes they throw in, nothing here is "proggy."  Everything's built around the groove, with extra notes and syncopation strictly to give the basic stuff a few more layers (Mark is a master at that).  As tempted as I sometimes get to see this record as an evolution of what Legend (who nobody listened to) pioneered, one could make a case for a more direct through-line from Sabbath to Warlord entirely based on their sense of groove.

So, between the three "real" songs so far, we've gotten a slamming (by which I here mean heavy emphasis on the downbeats) metal song about technology, a slick AOR-leaning song about heartbreak, and an incredibly groovy doom-adjacent epic about Satan.  Is there anything that this band can't nail?

Track Four:  "Soliloquy"

This, apparently.  I like the keyboard part paired with the pulsating guitars, but "Soliloquy" is a clear step down from the tracks that preceded it.  The vocal melody doesn't go anywhere, allowing us to focus on the drippy vocals, to their detriment.  Warlord are capable of making things sound dark and/or majestic, and they're capable of making the listener want to go and do great things.  Emotion and discussion of personal issues?  Not their strong suit.  I can't imagine feeling the slightest bit of sorrow for the narrator of a Warlord track.***

Track Five:  "Aliens"

A punchy up-tempo one with lots more clever bits of musicmanship.  Especially from Mark, of course, but everyone is pulling their weight here.  The pulse of the riff here is actually probably most like the Legend record mentioned earlier.  I like the vocals going off-key and I like the weird second half of the solo.  Things are just a little off-kilter here; something alien is everywhere.  Very fun little album track.

Track Six:  "MCMLXXXIV / Child Of The Damned"

Talking about the two and half minute instrumental part first.. nah, I don't really have anything to say.  The sinewy bass part is nice, but I'd be challenged to explain what exactly is being conveyed, or what it has to do with the song to which it's grafted.

I think I've already spoken at length about how much I like "Child Of The Damned," and it holds up to listen after listen.  I'm struck by how this once, really unlike the rest of the record, they sound unabashedly like a band that one can only call power metal.  In particular, this is the one time Mark just dives into the machine-gun cadence that I sometimes imagine was Helloween's specific thing.****  Diane's keys are tastefully used for punctuation, whilst Rick is straining for high notes and I continue to feel that his inconsistent ability to nail them only adds to the mystique of the whole thing.

Track Seven:  "Deliver Us From Evil / End"

Cast as the closer, DUFE, which was a good song anyway, lands as a life-affirming answer to the apocalyptic stuff that's led up to it.  There's an alternative to ill-minded rulers!  The band are back in their most common wheelhouse of seeing just how many endless variations they can get out of a straightforward bass heavy riff.  If I had a nickel for every act who can make a catchy refrain out of "deliver us from evil, we pray!" I'd have a nickel.  Even a moment of prayer is something epic with this band.

They finally go a little too far with the unnecessary ending to the song with the whispered vocals and the riff over and over, and a little guitar outro (a separate track on my streaming service) that's kinda there.

Miscellaneous comments:

Cannons almost comes across as a best-of-band effort.  A huge chunk of it is rerecordings of other '80s Warlord tracks, culling of course heavily from the Deliver Us EP.  For the most part, the songs stand on their own with either recording.  In a general sense, I prefer the mix on Cannons; that extra bit of echo just makes the depths deeper, somehow.  Other than getting a dedicated bassist instead of multi-tracking Bill, the big difference is obviously the switch to Rick Cunningham (slagged rather mercilessly in the interviews I've read) on vocals.  Supposedly his vocal limitations are cited as a key reason that one of their most popular songs from the EP, "Winter Tears," didn't make it onto Cannons.  Personally I both enjoy Rick's approach even if it's definitely more metal-appropriate than "good" in any classical sense.  The only repeated song where the vocal style is really all that noticeably different is "Child Of The Damned," and I'm Team Damien II on that one; it benefits from more high notes rather than the elongated snarling (Hetfieldian, basically) from the original version.

FWIW, Deliver Us opens with "Deliver Us From Evil," with a big extended intro, as a statement of purpose, and closes (bonus tracks notwithstanding) with their oldie, "Lucifer's Hammer."  Cannons flips that upside down, making the former song almost like an answer to the world set up by the latter.

Warlord are definitely on the trad-metal side of burgeoning subgenre, with enough moments to make me question many times whether this is really power metal, per se, but generally always including just enough PM-leaning traits that I'm willing to shrug and include them.

This batch of songs has been one of my favorite discoveries so far from my months of deciding to figure out power metal.  I guess I'd frame it by saying that of the various just-right spots for me - music that hits a winning combination on the axes of heaviness, melody, sophistication, fantastical-ness, etc., one of those sweet spots is occupied by the '80s version of Warlord.  I speculated in the survey post that maybe there's a whole wing of USPM that has a special appeal to me, but that maybe it's just Warlord.  So far I haven't found anyone who really sounds like them, doing the things they do quite so well.  My explorations are still pretty young, though.

Favorite track ("main" songs only):  "Black Mass"

Runner up:  "Child Of The Damned"

Least favorite track:  "Soliloquy"

Rating:  4.5/5

Coming up:  Early impressions of the "also recommended" pick, Riot's Thundersteel, whenever I get around to it!

*It does not seem to take its premise from the 1977 novel of the same name. 

**Okay, I do need to mock this just a little.

She said she would never leave me
Never let me go
But now she's left with me this feeling
So sad and so alone
She went away, I tried to find her
I cried aloud her name
I realized it was goodbye
The heartache and the pain

Shakespeare this is not.

***They maybe waved once at a decent sad song with "Winter Tears," but it didn't take.

****Based on its appearance on the Jag Panzer tracks I sampled, it's probably more something that originally made its way into power by way of thrash and kinda stuck around as a defining element.