Trivia / Warbringer

• Creator's Oddball: IV: Empires Collapse is vastly different from anything else in their discography, with a curious blend of Progressive Metal stylings and crossover thrash. This was due to two main factors: the band as a whole were tired of being stuck with the "retro" and "pizza thrash" labels just because they played modern thrash and wanted to answer the people who wouldn't stop calling them a bandwagon act by making something that could not be pigeonholed, which led to most of the more progressive tracks. On the other hand, John Laux was burnt out and sick of metal and was getting ready to quit, which led to John Kevill giving him free rein in an attempt to placate him, which resulted in the more punk and crossover-oriented tracks that made it on. While the album was made during a very dysfunctional period in the band's history and has a lot of material that still sticks out years later, Kevill has gone on record as viewing the album as necessary, as it was the first point where the band really made a point of thinking outside the box on a large scale, and it allowed for the marriage of their older style with more adventurous and creative songwriting on their later output.
• Throw It In!: As per Kevill, "Forgotten Dead" was written at the last possible minute by Kevill onomatopoeically sounding out the guitar parts to Adam Carroll, who transcribed them to the best of the ability until the song was complete and Kevill presented it to the rest of the band and told them it was going to be on the album. A fight apparently ensued over the song, and while it made it on, the rest of the band was pissed off about it, and it took until 2015 for the band to finally play it with an almost completely different lineup, as the song had so many bad vibes attached that no one had wanted to touch it for a while.
• What Could Have Been: Kevill was asked to join a Demolition Hammer reunion as their vocalist. While they were his favorite band and his biggest musical influence, he refused because he felt that anyone other than Steve Reynolds on vocals would not be proper, himself included.

---