Warlord
Best Of Warlord

THE REVIEW

Despite my neighbors believing otherwise, I have never been a great admirer of classic heavy metal.

Not so much due to a factor of stylistic immobility (legitimate and legitimized for genres like prog and punk which I love), nor for a hypothetical lack of originality (if I had to listen only to totally "different" records, I would have to give up 95% of my collection) but for a lack of personality.

This is even truer today, within the power scene where most bands are too busy playing at the speed of light to produce appreciable variations in register within the same album or, indeed, throughout their entire career.

Call me nostalgic, but once the phenomenon was less evident. The punk rage of early Iron Maiden, the encounter with the folk of Skyclad, the bootlegs of Rush and Pink Floyd under the bed of Voivod were the winning strategies to differentiate from the masses, simply by looking around.

Paradigmatic is the case of my favorites, Warlord.

The band led by William Tsamis and Mark Zonder debuted in 1983 with "Deliver Us," followed the next year by the equally extraordinary "...And The Cannons Of Destruction Have Begun," both present in this "Best" (with the addition of a previously unreleased track, "Mrs. Victoria"), which thus becomes the best way to get to know them.

The Los Angeles group was unfairly compared to the more simplistic Manowar, Cirith Ungol, and Manilla Road for the epic component of their proposal. In reality, even working in the 80s, Warlord had the same musical approach as the great hard bands of the past.

Imagine a "dry" Uriah Heep thanks to the gift of synthesis typical of an eighties group, or a new prog band revisited in a hard key (my mind keeps thinking of Pallas): these were Warlord.
The song form is never sacrificed to technique, even when stumbling upon an instrumental like "Soliloquy," where the music changes by degrees, without abrupt jolts, so as not to interrupt its pathos.

The appeal does not lack folk elements ("Deliver Us From Evil," "Penny For A Poor Man"), doom hints, and the shadow of some forgotten underground progressive group. Needless to talk about the speed of "Child Of The Damned", capable of making a good impression even when covered by Hammerfall. My favorite songs are "Aliens" and "Lost And Lonely Days", the latter endowed with a melancholy that, in other fields, only Caravan and Sad Lovers And Giants managed to create.

Cult band par excellence, the nostalgia for our Heroes was filled by the reunion and the album "Rising Out Of The Ashes" in 2002, but the magic had vanished.

Their sound was successfully proposed by Falconer, but that is another story...