It seems almost psychotically fitting that on the day I am to meet John Kevill from Warbringer, I find myself in the middle of New York City during a terror alert. Chaos, anger, swat teams and machine guns surround me as Times Square is evacuated when a bomb was found in an abandoned van.
Of course, one thing has nothing to do with the other. But the themes and visions this Ventura, California band explode about nightly play out all around me, as real and disturbing as any Warbringer song foretells. It’s a glaring example of the world these young but seasoned thrashers give us, with brutal honesty, in their music.
As they were finishing their recent tour with Overkill, Vader and Skeletonwitch, lead vocalist John Kevill took the time to let me pick his brain for a while. And amidst failed bombs and uncertain futures, it was good to discover Warbinger knows what the hell they are doing to keep thrash alive.
Explicitly Intense: May 1st, 2010, Nokia Theater, New York, New York. And I'm going to go ahead and start the interview here with a very patient John Kevill.
So just to start out, there seems to be a lot of interview information, but not so much “history” that I could find online. So, I would like to hear the best condensed good version of how Warbringer came together.
John Kevill: Okay. Well, here's how it goes. I was getting into heavy metal and wanted to start a band. And my effort to doing this, as someone who didn't really have any skill in anything at the time, eventually lead me to John Laux, and that's when things really got started. I've been trying to start a band for like six months before I met him.
But then I did and Andy came in, his brother, came in on bass. We found Adam on drums initially, and jammed in his garage for a while. Played our first show like six months later in the summer. And from then as a local band, we just tried to rehearse all the time, there were a few lineup changes. You know, trying to get a strong dedicated lineup, we ran on a simultaneous – some of us, myself included, ran a simultaneous band called Zombie, so I was in two bands for a while.
And Zombie kind of folded, so we just put the best members from there. And made the Warbringer lineup for the first album kind of fusion of the two bands that were coexisting at the same time. We got some interest from record labels after we did a CD. And got signed and they told us “you're going to go on tour”, and been on tour ever since.
Explicitly Intense: If I can go back even further before all of the band stuff started - how did you know each other? Or how did you find each other?
John Kevill: We didn't know each other before the band.
Explicitly Intense: So, it was just the band that brought you together?
John Kevill: Yeah. It was just “okay, who do I know that listens to heavy metal? Nobody.” Oh, this guy listens to like Megadeth or something, because John Laux, who's big into Megadeth, like that was the band that he knew. And I was like “okay, sweet, I'll hang out with this guy.” You know? It was just that, it was – we were all kind of getting into the music.
Adam and Ryan Bates, our former drummer, had been into it a little longer. But John and I were like – we had been listening to metal for like a year at most. And when we met and – yeah, we're still just really excited about the music and everything and wanted to start a band.
Explicitly Intense: That's what I was trying to delve into, if you knew each other from kindergarten or anything like that…
John Kevill: No, no, no. I met all these folks through trying to start this band.
Explicitly Intense: So, it's been six years since the first demo? 2004?
John Kevill: 2005.
Explicitly Intense: 2005. Okay, so five years. Your reputation, though, as a really true brutal thrash band is very solid. I did an interview recently with Sacrifice, and Rob Urbinati was quoted as having Warbringer as one of his favorite new thrash bands.
John Kevill: Awesome.
Explicitly Intense: What do you think are the factors that give you this kind of edge? Being a newer thrash band, but really being solidly implanted into the thrash scene?
John Kevill: Well, we're still working on that; I think the main one is just we've played a royal ton of shows. You know, getting in front of a lot of people, and we've always been really about the live shows. People – I mean, some people talk trash on the new thrash thing, because indeed, thrash metal is not a new genre. But I think it's one that still deserves to be played.
And another thing is because we've tried to play live, and we do, I think, more than some of the other bands in the new thrash – we do try to write our own songs that have their own hooks and have our own sound somewhat and everything. And I think that helps too. We don't sound - I don't think we sound - like any one specific thrash band. You can't really point to like one band and be like “Warbringer sounds like that.” We have all of our influences in our music.
Explicitly Intense: I think that's what keeps you standing apart is because you don't listen to Warbringer and say “oh, that's a rip off of this, or that's a rip off of that.” You do have your own sound.
John Kevill: Now, there's parts where you could rightly say like “oh, this sounds a bit like this or this sounds a bit like that.” Different things. And that's kind of what the original thrash bands did anyway.
Explicitly Intense: Now, I'm sure that your ages are brought up over and over again in interviews. But how did you get into the genre of music seeing as you didn't grow up in the “age” of thrash?
John Kevill: I just like things that I think sound awesome, and you know, I heard some thrash metal and thought it sounded great. Heavy metal in general, like old heavy metal of all types, thrash, death, speed, black heavy metal. I just like all of that stuff.
Explicitly Intense: So you stumbled upon it?
John Kevill: Yeah, pretty much. I started out, it was metal and like just from Sabbath and classic rock and kind of went from there. Eventually got into the more extreme stuff, which started the thrash for me. So, it's just that. And that's about where I was in the kind of music I was listening. John and I were just starting to get into that particular style when we met, so we kind of fed each other the bands that we knew, like, I knew Artillery and showed him that, and he knew like some other band and he showed me that. You know, kind of works that way and we were like “oh, wouldn't it be cool”. We'd listen to it and talk about the music a lot, and try to write songs based on like ideas we had from all this music we were discovering.
Explicitly Intense: Do you feel like you're treated differently on tour or by record labels because you're a younger band?
John Kevill: I feel we're pretty well respected on tour by all the other folks on there. I think pretty much that doesn't seem to matter much, if you put on a good live show and do a tour, then you get the respect. Our first couple tours, we were obviously newbies at it. But we're not anymore, so we're not treated as such.
Explicitly Intense: Now, what was the live music scene where you grew up, specifically? And how did that affect your sound?
John Kevill: There wasn't a whole – Ventura County, there's not a whole lot of metal. There were the metal shows in Ventura for like the first couple years we were starting out. We played there a few times. But a lot of the venues, the smaller venues, you know, a local band can just go and play at close-down. So then we had to start getting into the scene at Hollywood, which, you know, costs an arm and leg to do if you're a local band. So that sucked.
But we did have some good shows doing that, we managed to make it work, we got some attention that way. There's the whole LA thrash scene starting up at that time, which we had kind of a mixed relationship with. But we seemed to be the band from that whole scene that's going out and really going around the world and stuff.
Explicitly Intense: What is your songwriting technique for now? The way you're doing it today?
John Kevill: Well, it's always pretty much, we'll have some riffs or like an idea and we'll just go jam on it, and then just blacksmith it out pretty much until we like it.
Explicitly Intense: Is there any one of you that is the head songwriter or the head idea person? Or is it all members?
John Kevill: A lot of it's – more so the further back you go, it's like John Laux and I, but more recently, it's involved (guitarist) Adam (Carroll) a lot more, it's involved (drummer) Nic (Ritter) some. John Laux continues to probably be like the main ripster of the band, but Adam did almost as much for the album as he did.
So, it's just as everyone's more cemented in, because it started off with John Laux and I and everyone else were totally cemented in. Like now, it's like we couldn't have the band without Adam, we feel like he's been in it since almost day-one, you know?
Explicitly Intense: How did you come up with the themes of the songs on the most recent release, especially songs like “Scorched Earth” - drinking out of skulls and things like that?
John Kevill: That one was – okay, because most of the lyrics on the new one – like there was five or six songs on the first album that were just about like warfare, battle, and et cetera. You know, just from like an exaggerated metalized angle. And it's like “okay, we did that”. We did a lot of that. And so, the second album, (we’re) just trying to make it more like demoralizing, just about like futility of life and things like that. It's really unhappy type of stuff. And not unhappy like “woe is me”, but just like “ah-ha, the human race is worthless”, you know, that kind of thing.
But “Scorched Earth” in particular was like okay, well we've done all these more like serious lyrics on some of the songs, like a “Banned By Time” or like “Prey For Death”. And then, that one, let's have a song about some bad ass who like rides around on a motorcycle and kills shit. Some action movie character. You know, because it's still good to have those kind of lyrics, it's just more fun.
Explicitly Intense: The current tour - just give me a quick rundown of what it's like playing with all these really legendary bands! Not that you haven't been playing with really high-end bands…
John Kevill: With the same bands….
Explicitly Intense: But….(laughing)
John Kevill: Yeah, we've been touring with most of these bands on this tour, three out of five of the other ones we've toured with already. Overkill, Vader and all in the last year and a half.
Explicitly Intense: How was it this time? How does it feel? Is it like old buddies?
John Kevill: Overkill have always been a little reclusive; they kind of stay on their bus and keep to themselves, but you know, no problems there. Everyone else is buddies, yeah. The whole under-part of this tour has been really like – you know, we spend all night with outside, in the parking lot, like passing around a huge bottle of wine, smoking and stuff. Good times.
Explicitly Intense: That's the way to do it. Definitely good! Who would you say you are seeing as the typical Warbringer fan when you're playing live?
John Kevill: Well, there's a lot of different folks, you know, we'll find like, you know, like young kids, old dudes, some chicks. It's all over.
Explicitly Intense: So, it's a mixture really? There's no “typical”?
John Kevill: No, there's no typical. I mean, there's certain categories, but I wouldn't know of any particular one of them is typical. Like, the denim vest kids, and then there's like the scene-looking kid, who's like he's at a metal show and enjoying that, there's a group of those who are always at metal shows. Like on the Vader tour and stuff. There's the old dudes who will tell you stories about when they saw like Overkill in 1986 or something. There's a whole bunch of different types of fans and it's cool that many different sorts of people can like our music.
Explicitly Intense: What do you think of the current state of the new music?
John Kevill: Not a big fan. And I don't think that there's like new developments in metal that really are super metal, right? Although, what they're doing now is kind of leaving the metal genre. It's cool and all, but it's phrasing just awesome metal that's designed to just rock as hard as possible. That kind of music hasn't done anything new or had a lot of great bands, I don't think, recently. But we're trying to just fill that by writing the best songs we can, and play them live.
I think it's hard to find, personally, I'm not a big fan of newer sounds and modern metal, I'm not a fan of most of them. I think like modern death metal is way weaker than old death metal, for example. Or like all the spinoffs of modern death metal are just like bottom of the barrel kind of things. That's pretty much mostly what we see nowadays. Like various spinoffs of generic brutal stuff.
Explicitly Intense: Too many sub-genres, in my opinion.
John Kevill: Yeah!
Explicitly Intense: Do you think the digital recording has helped or hurt heavy metal at this point?
John Kevill: I don't know, I guess it helps. You can get that stupid super pro tool sound, which is never good. But having clear good-sounding records is nice. In fact, if someone – if they have the know-how - can do it for a really low budget now is cool. One consequence is there's now a flood of bands that have recordings because it's much easier to do. You don't need a lot of money to make a good recording anymore. You can make like an alright, solid recording on your own computer, if you just spend some time figuring out what you're doing.
So, it does kind of result in a little flooding of the market, but I guess I'm all for that. Everybody being able to make and record the music they want to, so it can't be too bad.
Explicitly Intense: Okay, last question; who do you see as the future of heavy metal… besides Warbringer?
John Kevill: Well, I hope we'll be around in the future. Hell, that's a hard question. That is something I wondered about myself, like, where is the genre going? That I can point to and be like yes, that's a great direction to go in? And the truth is, I think nobody knows the answer to that, and that's the problem. Heavy metal's been around for about like what? A little over 35 – around like 35 years or something? So, 35-40 years, I would say, and for the most part, everyone knows what heavy metal is, what the broad parameters are of what makes a metal song a metal song or whatever.
There's many, many different ways to do it, and I think that most have been explored. You know, you can't. Nobody's rewritten a book on classical music in a while, because the book's kind of written, it's done.
So, I just hope that – I mean, in spite of that, the true spirit of the genre, bands playing that awesome feeling heavy metal stuff, keep doing it.
Explicitly Intense: Do you have any last things you want to plug or just last parting words for the interview?
John Kevill: This is the last show of the Overkill tour, and then we're going to Japan.
Explicitly Intense: Like you're going straight to Japan?
John Kevill: We're driving across the country and then going straight to Japan!
Explicitly Intense: Wow! So great luck on that.
John Kevill: Should be cool.
Warbringer has finished their tour of Asia, and continues their touring onslaught in Europe though mid-September. They return to the States and Canada immediately post-Europe with dates though November 5. Hopefully after that, they will allow themselves to get some sleep.
By Holly King
http://www.myspace.com/warbringer
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Warbringer/34913752005
