NEW WARBRINGER > NEW SUICIDE SILENCE

Everywhere ya look, there’s an announcement of a new and unexpected pairing: Mastodon/hip hop producer, Metallica/Lou Reed, Mike Portnoy/butt-rock, and Rob Zombie/garment care. Well, Strange Bedfellows Month continues with news that Warbringer’s just-completed third album, Worlds Torn Asunder, was produced by Steve Evetts. His name is on good punk records (Saves The Day, Lifetime), veiny hardcore (Snapcase, Earth Crisis), and Symphony X; and, natch, he’s the Flemming Rasmussen to Dillinger Escape Plan’s Metallica. So dude has some stats.

And hats off to Warbringer and their pattern-busting choice. Really, on a SAT complete-the-series puzzle that read “Producer Bill Metoyer, producer Gary Holt …”, a response of Steve Evetts wouldn’t even earn you partial credit. So change is exciting. Plus, I credit Evetts (lolz) with saving Sepultura via his work on the violent, flabless, totally de-Maxed Against album, the band’s first with singer Derrick Green. That shit rips.

Now sure, Evetts has been unable to deter Dillinger from making the same album three times, and He Is Legend’s Suck Out The Poison was catastrophe, and a lot of his records are rough and scratchy, not blunt and crunchy per Warbringer sensibility. But should there be any worry for Warbringer’s follow-up to 2009’s Waking Into Nightmares mega-jam, there’s solace in the fact that Evetts’ helmed the best, heaviest-sounding 2011 album I’ve heard so far, The Black Crown by Suicide Silence. So tight, so slamming! So bring on the new Warbringer. So do.

-ADF

Warbringer’s Worlds Torn Asunder is slated for September release on Century Media. It will probably sound less like third-rate Slipknot than The Black Crown.