Liner Notes: Warbringer, 'Waking Into Nightmares'

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WARBRINGER SHOULD CONSIDER getting a timeshare in Northern Virginia. The Ventura, Calif.-based thrash metal band has played Jaxx at least a half dozen times in the past year.

At least they think that's the case.

"I don't remember most of when our shows are," said vocalist John Kevill, 22.

Actually, Warbringer could have timeshares from coast to coast. The band seems to be on a never-ending tour.

"Any given night, Warbringer is playing somewhere. They seem to be on every single tour," laughed Adam Haritan, drummer from fellow road warriors and neo-thrashers Mantic Ritual.

"We average 8 or 9 hours a day driving," Kevill said. "Sometimes its really short — like 2 or 3 hours — but then we have to go from Portland to San Francisco in a day, and that's 12-plus hours."

So, how do five fellas in their early 20s deal with being on the road pretty much year-round?

"We pull off and smoke pot so we can sleep more," Kevill said. "That's basically it."

After spending most of 2008 on the road in support of its debut album, "War Without End" (Century Media), Warbringer took a mere two months to write and record its second album, "Waking Into Nightmares" (Century Media), which was produced by Exodus' Gary Holt. [Read our interview with Holt here.]

"We only made one album before, and we wrote it over two years or so," Kevill said. "[Before making 'Waking Into Nightmares'] we had one and half songs done plus a few random ideas lingering around. For five days a week during November and December [2008], we got the whole album done. Some of the ideas date back to before the first album — riffs that people remembered and were never resolved."

Even with the speed of its creation, "Waking Into Nightmares" is a crunchy continuation of the thrash-metal-punk blur heard on "War Without End" — with one exception: war isn't a major lyrical theme this time.

"I've always been interested in the subject, and it seems natural with the genre," Kevill said. "But because so many people said that's what we always write about, we consciously moved away from it on this record. There's only one song ["Forgotten Dead"] that strictly covers it. But I intend to keep the lyrics violent and covering battle and war themes; it's always an element we'll have. And a lot of our [music] has a militaristic style to it with the rhythms."

It's the sound of an eternal road march — more Bataan than Carnival.

Kevill gave Express a song-by-song tour of "Waking Into Nightmares"

"Jackal"
That's a murderous betrayal one. [It's not based on personal experience.] We were just looking to branch out on subjects while keeping with violent [topics], so we worked with it and made a song of it.

"Living in a Whirlwind"
Downward spiral of drugs and depression that leaves somebody to live like a rat in the streets. I haven't done that; the concept was by the rest of the band and I worked with it. There's the movie "Combat Shock," and we have a song by that same name on the last record — our drummer [Nic Ritter] had seen the movie, threw the title out there for the song, and a few months later the rest of us all saw the film. It's a Trauma film, so it's really low-fi and brutal about it. When that topic came up, that's what my mind went to. He gets beat up by loan sharks trying to get more money for drugs, and somebody rips open his vein with a coat hanger and shoves stuff in it. It's the least silly Trauma movie ever. The whole film is just vomiting and "We're living like rats!" and his baby's a mutant. It just sucks.

That one is a personal experience. It's about the worst [mushroom] trip ever. Horrific and freaky things happening. ... I'm glad now in retrospect it happened because I really like the lyrics for that song.

"Scorched Earth"
That one we were pretty much like, "We need a song about just general '80s-action-style badassery." ... It's just a really good reason to have the most badass violent lines I could come up with.

"Abandoned by Time"
That one came really fast, but the title dates back to when we were touring Europe with Napalm Death and Suffocation. [Napalm's] Mick Harris put that out and said, "You should call your album that." We ended up not calling the album that, but when Adam wrote this one song with all these riffs I just stuck that title to it, and a day later I had all the lyrics. It's about the general unchanging of men's savagery and throughout the ages how it has been the same always. And also about how everything we do is buried by time ... kind of those two things melded into one. I just tried to write some of the most demoralizing anti-human lyrics that I could.

"Prey for Death"
That's another demoralizing anti-human one. Basically, you put a bunch of bacteria in a petri dish and they will thrive until resources expire and then what happens? Society collapses and they all feed on each other, and die-offs reduce the population massively. Blow that up and that petri dish is the planet we're on and we're the bacteria.

"Nightmare Anatomy"
That's an instrumental. It's probably pretty unexpected for us to put something like that on the record, because it's progressive and completely non-thrashy. But we like it because it sounds all trippy and it break sup the thrash a bit.

"Shadow From the Tomb"
[Bassist Ben Bennett] did the lyrics for this song. This is probably the most extreme-metal-influenced song on the record. As Ben wrote the lyrics, it's about lighting children on fire and masturbating and being a psychotic person who does this.

"Senseless Life"
I guess the line that sums it up is "If you can't think for yourself then you are already dead."

"Forgotten Dead"
That song is about fucking war.

» Jaxx, 6355 Rolling Rd., Springfield, Va.; with Kreator, Exodus, Belphegor and Epicurean; Sun., May 17, 5:45 p.m., $25; 703-569-5940.

Photos by Alex Solca