War Of Ages
There’s toughness and then there’s self-made toughness. Like the main character that falls to the bottom of that vertical goldmine shaft in the recent epic There Will Be Blood, sometimes lessons and skills are learned without a coach, audience or sympathetic ear. Failure is not final, but it’s like a disciplinarian rod that reinforces each educational moment with pain. For the self-produced musician, this sometimes comes in the form of listening to a finished album for the first time. Regrets and thoughts of “wishin-it’d-been-done-another-way” will sometimes overshadow even the joy of a finished product and will go on to haunt the artist until the next time they can enter a studio and create again. Previous recordings from War Of Ages, like their self-titled debut on Strike First Records (later re-released on the mothership label Facedown as Fire From The Tomb) were all self-produced, with only their own, slightly-biased five sets of ears and maybe a lucky friend or two to tell the band if and when a song needed some work or even to be shown the door to that bottomless pit of discarded song ideas.
It’s a good thing for this Erie, PA, quintet that the vast majority of their songwriting ideas thus far were pretty darn good. As they set out to make their third full-length album, the prevailing thought was that an outside producer could teach these metal dogs a new trick or two. Holed up for several weeks with budding producer and As I Lay Dying frontman Tim Lambesis, the group was stretched beyond its comfort zone with its very first experience with someone else at the production helm.
“We didn’t know how it was gonna be at first,” admits vocalist and chief lyricist Leroy Hamp, “because we were, like, ‘Okay, he’s a singer, (but) can he write? What kind of ideas does he have?’ We’ve never worked with a producer before, so we knew that we had to be open; however, we didn’t know what he was going to bring creatively to the table, either. He sat us in the practice room and re-structured songs with us and (we) wrote two in the studio with him. Basically, he’s been a blessing-and-a-half to work with and awesome. It’s been very smooth and he’s easy to work with and easy to get along with. Our personalities mesh very well and we just work very quickly with him.”
© 2008 HM Magazine, LLC. All rights reserved.
War Of Ages - Finish this feature by Doug Van Pelt in the new HM Magazine. Available now, Issue 132 can be found at select stores or for a reduced subscription rate.
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