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Warbringer Concert Review
Rolling into town nearly five months after the last show I covered, Soilwork’s 2009 US tour was a prime opportunity to shake off the rust. This tour is their last in support of ‘Sworn To A Great Divide’ before they return home for a break and, eventually, to work on their next album. Joining the bill was Darkane, Helsingborg, Sweden’s other best export, with support coming from Warbringer and Finland’s Swallow the Sun. Though I tried to take a laissez-faire approach to the night’s proceedings, I couldn’t help keeping score to see which group would come out as Helsingborg’s finest. More the fool I for thinking I could choose.
Opening the night was the Chicago-area group Carry the Day. A young bunch, my guess is that they were the ones responsible for the majority of the teenage girl crowd. Combined with the band’s metalcore leanings, the show’s first hour was awkwardly reminiscent of a VFW high school band showcase. Though Carry the Day seemed to have some solid playing ability, the fact that they covered of Lamb of God’s ‘Redneck’ during their 20-minute set told me all I needed to know.
Following them was Luna Mortis, a Wisconsin band just recently signed to Century Media, who combine some traditional metal riffing with thrashy modern flourishes and a female lead vocalist. To compare them to two other female-fronted crews that have run through Mokena, they combine Light This City’s guitar energy with Echoes of Eternity’s vocal dynamic. By around 8:15 the audience had grown significantly by and seemed to enjoy the band’s set, which wisely drew mostly from their harsh vocal material. Mary Zimmer handled the transition from clean to harsh adequately, but her screams have the same static quality that holds back so many female metal vocalists.
I was soon called away for the Soilwork interview, so I didn’t see the remainder of their set and the entirety of Swallow the Sun’s. Missing the Finnish doomsters was disappointing, since I had seem their last tour with Scar Symmetry and Katatonia and been captivated by the weighty atmosphere they evoked. From what I heard from audience members later on, they had been no less impressive this time around.
Tasked with reinvigorating the audience and priming the stage for the night’s big event was Warbringer, the rising thrash revivalists from California. Looking much more at ease than last year’s set at the Metro (with Nile) and with more vocal crowd support, the young quintet delivered 30 minutes of rousing if somewhat unoriginal homage to the 80s. Sporting all the genre’s visual clichés—unlaced white Reeboks, cut-off metal T’s (Obituary, etc.), unkempt curly locks, fierce gesticulations—the band’s two Johns, vocalist Kevill and lead guitarist Laux, certainly know how to play to the crowd. The remaining three members were much more insular, but keeping pace with the other two is enough to earn them performance kudos. Bassist Bill Bennett even busted out a wah pedal for a couple tracks and was the sole bassist I saw using fingers over picks.
Some fans in the front row sang along to such choice refrains as ‘Combat Shock’—“Endless killing, endless death, raging homicide/millions dead and more to die, total genocide”—while others kept up an energetic, albeit slightly under-populated, circle pit. The band tossed a few new tracks into their set, which were met with general approval, and which sounded almost exactly like the rest of their songs: up-tempo open string chugging, rapid fire vocals and gang vox choruses of explicit violence. Classic thrash material. While the band has yet to prove their longevity in the studio, they certainly succeeded in inspiring the crowd; immediately after their set, a pack of thrash rats were already headbanging and singing along to the loudspeakers playing Testament’s ‘Into The Pit’. As one fan summarized it, turning in the front row to rave at everyone in earshot, “Fuckin’ A! It’s motherfucking Warbringer!”
Entertaining as they were, the night really broke open when Darkane arrived. Taking the stage to a symphonic backing track, the band saluted the audience and, without counting in, dove into a relentless 40-minute set. The guitarists, anchored by the lithe basswork of a cheery Jörgen Löfberg, played with almost inhuman precision. Christofer Malmström and Klas Ideberg seemed to exert barely any energy as they leapt from speeding first position rhythm riffs to intricately melodic solos twenty frets up the neck. Thrashing along on his doubled snare drum kit, Peter Wildoer was as impossibly prolific as on record, alternating from his distinctive cymbal patterns to crushing blasts.
And looking right at home in the middle of it all was the band’s new vocalist, Jens Broman, who appears on Darkane’s latest album, ‘Demonic Art’. Playing the emotional, sweat-drenched counterpart to Christofer’s collected poise, Broman looks rather like Joaquin Phoenix playing Wolverine in his cage-fighting days, right down to the swooped hairdo. Vocally, his style falls somewhere between the band’s previous two vocalists, Andreas Sydow and Lawrence Mackerory, being slightly shriller than the former and more dynamic than the latter. He seemed equally at ease handling the band’s early and recent material, and was particularly adept at the lower, gruff grunts of Sydow’s era. Live, we unfortunately don’t hear much of the chorus harmonies that make Darkane’s latter-day work so exceptional. What we do get to experience are their gargantuan balls of thrashing death metal—no poor substitute.
As I later discovered, the band all play to individual in-ear click tracks, which explains why they never counted in to a song and had the stage’s side monitors facing the crowd. They also are all hooked into PODS, which have a direct line into the sound board. While this makes for a rather hectic first minute once they start playing—the bass and drums were overwhelmingly loud—the final instrumental mix is an absolute mammoth.
Their set drew from nearly their entire catalogue: the new album’s title track, ‘Secondary Efforts’, ‘Fading Dimensions’, ‘Chaos Vs. Order’, ‘Imaginary Entity’, and ‘The Rape of Mankind’, as best I can recall. After around 30 minutes, the constant assault left the audience a little exhausted, which the band seemed to notice. Their own energy level dipped only slightly and by the set’s end, they had surged back, capping their performance with a devastating polyrhythmic breakdown, as heard at the end of ‘Innocence Gone’. The audience’s headbanging rhythm severely thrown off, they gave us thanks and departed, leaving the stage to Soilwork’s setup crew. As we all collected ourselves, someone nearby commented in a daze, “You know, Darkane would have to try really hard to write bad music. And even then it’d probably be good.” Indeed.
Soilwork’s preparations brought us back on track, first by raising their colorful ‘Sworn…’ backdrop, then as their guitar tech warmed up their Engl stacks and laid out the band’s ESP instruments. When the lights went down, the band made their entrance to The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ and a grandiose taped spiel introducing the band almost as if they were heavyweight champs in a boxing match: “Ladies and gentlemen…Sweden’s finest—Soilwork!” Immediately thereafter, another taped voice came on, saying, “Welcome, won’t you please step aside and follow the hollow,” and so the show began.
Though the band has been in my library for nearly a decade, I’d never really realized how heavily a couple core techniques play into their sound. First among these is Björn’s vocal approach. We are all familiar with his penchant for screaming the verses and singing the choruses, but what I hadn’t paid much attention to was his delivery. Almost like a hip-hop artist’s flow, he races against the beat to get his words out smoothly and with dynamic rhythm. This transitioned well into the live setting where he could mix up his pitch or cadence, such as the bridge of ‘Black Star Deceiver’. His on-stage attitude contributes to the hip-hop comparison, too; with his tattoos, long graphic T-shirt (not touting a metal band), chain necklace, and habitual head bobs, he looks only a few bars away from a ‘Hey-ho’ at any given time. Once those choruses hit, though, those comparisons are out. With deceptive ease, Björn slipped into a calmer demeanor and hit his spots confidently, sounding like the veteran he is. In these moments, it was nearly impossible not to sing along to the likes of ‘Shadowchild’, ‘Song of the Damned’, and ‘Light the Torch’.
The second technique is how heavily Peter Wicher’s songwriting draws from other genres. Chops that I’d always just thought of as the ‘Soilwork sound’ are indeed uniquely theirs, but the influences behind it became clearer: classic rock strumming patterns, post rock chording, progressive solo phrasing, and more. New guitarist Sylvain Coudret managed to play all the band’s techniques while still looking ‘metal’, but Peter himself was rocking out, not unlike an overgrown teenager. There were, thankfully, no windmills or leather pants, and Peter’s playing was top notch despite his three-year hiatus from the band. Sylvain Coudret, who comes to the band from another of Dirk Verbeuren’s bands, Scarve, commanded the other side of the stage. Sporting one of the band’s oldest and grimmest t-shirt designs, he ripped off solos back and forth with Peter and playfully interrupted Björn with guitar squeals in between songs.
During my interview with Soilwork, Björn and Peter had both referred to Dirk’s drumming as “tasteful”. This much I already knew, but given the chance to study him for an entire set, I became even more persuaded. He has a marked ability to handle the band’s swung riffs and to play on the offbeat without being ostentatious, and his straight metal form is impeccable. Both he and Peter Wildoer of Darkane use only one bass drum, but Dirk makes up the low end with his 16” and 18” inch floor toms, which he tunes very low.
Like many who got into metal around the millennium, Soilwork was part of my metal upbringing, so to finally hear songs from ‘The Chainheart Machine’ through ‘Figure Number Five’ performed live was nostalgic. They dug into old and new material with equal verve, but the big singles were clearly what most of the audience had come to see. Their 90-minute set ran in full: ‘Follow the Hollow’, ‘Like the Average Stalker’, ‘Exile’, ‘Needlefeast’, ‘Rejection Role’, ‘Black Star Deceiver’, ’20 More Miles’, ‘Song of the Damned’, ‘Shadowchild’, ‘Sworn to a Great Divide’, ‘Distortion Sleep’, ‘The Chainheart Machine’, ‘Light the Torch’, ‘Stabbing the Drama’, and an encore of ‘As We Speak’ and ‘Nerve’.
Later on in their set, Björn took a moment to salute the other bands and thank the audience for coming out. “I know times are tough,” he said, “so thank you for spending your hard-earned money on Soilwork.” He also gave a special tip of the cap to Darkane’s Klas Ideberg, who was on his last show of the tour before returning to Sweden. “No one can thrash like Klas,” with which I completely agree. Driving home, when it came time to tally my mental score, no clear winner emerged. Darkane had run us through a gauntlet of brutality and Soilwork had brought us back up with their energy and pure entertainment. Unable to choose between the two, I could only conclude that the night belonged to Helsingborg.
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