Warship, Supply and Depend

What do you do when the big-name, influential as all get-out metalcore band you’re doing time in crashes and burns? In the case of From Autumn To Ashes’ Francis Mark and Rob Lauritsen, well, you get a chance to finally do that side project-type thing together that you’ve wanted to do for a while now, and do something that’s at least a little bit different in the process.

Not that Warship’s debut, Supply and Defend, truly does a whole lot that’s new, mind you. The songs the duo (Mark on vocals and drums, Lauritsen on guitars and bass) comes up with meld together the guys’ metalcore roots, all speedy thrash and chunky guitars and half-screaming vocals, with doom-y, bluesy, straight-up metal a la Early Man, Federation X, and the like. The result is thundering, bass-heavy, with guitars that swerve between Pelican and Deftones, coupled with vocals that are shredded and ragged but never incomprehensible. It’s heavy and raw, but not as far over-the-top as screamo, thankfully, and incorporates quite a bit of actual melody (again, drawing things nearer to Deftones territory, or maybe Far). A handful of the tracks are downright pretty, albeit in a desperate way, not something I’d tend to expect from a couple of metalcore vets.

Lauritsen’s bass, all things considered, is the band’s secret weapon. I’ve got no clue how Lauritsen makes his sound so crunching and heavy, but still keep it well-defined. It’s big and grand, heavy but nowhere near sludgy, and that’s no mean feat. His bass is like the sound of some old-world deity stomping across the landscape; it’s “big” like a thundercloud is “big,” and just as impressive. That said, he’s no solo player. In spite of Warship being a two-man band, Supply and Depend feels a hell of a lot like a tightly-coiled four-piece unit.

Lyrically, this tends to be some deep stuff. Not pretentious, really, but deep, kind of a ten-song meditation on the burnt-out and cracked-wide-open state of the world; tracks like “Wounded Paw” and “Empty Vessel” are about searching for meaning in a world that sometimes seems designed to keep us stupid and compliant. It’s got a serious political bent, but not in a real specific way, just more of a “fight the system” feel that’s reminiscent at times of a less-overt Strike Anywhere.

Even the titles of songs like “Profit Over People” and “We’ve Never Been Equal” pretty much spell out Frank’s general worldview. Will Supply and Depend change the universe, musically or sociopolitically? Nah, probably not. But it’s a nice change of pace, all the same.