Review WARLORD “Free Spirit Soar”

American metal veterans Warlord are back with a new album. “Free Spirit Soar” is the band’s first studio album in nine years and follows 2015’s “The Hunt for Damien”. The only remaining members of the band are bassist Philip Bynoe and Mark Zonder. The legendary drummer once again provides the heartbeat of the album.

“Free Spirit Soar” is a special album in the sense that it is a tribute to former guitarist and founding member William J. Tsamis, who passed away in 2021. The album is singer Giles Lavery’s tribute to Tsamis, one of the great guitarists in heavy metal, and his musical legacy.

The basic patterns for the songs came from the former Warlord guitarist and it is the current line-up that worked on these ideas and turned them into songs. They tried to keep the arrangements as close to the original idea as possible and some guitar parts were even extracted from demo tapes. So you can hear Bill on this album.

This background makes it difficult to have an objective look at the songs on the album. There are some good songs on “Free Spirit Soar”, like the powerful “The Bell Tolls”. At the same time there is a lot of standard material on the album like “Alarm”, which doesn’t belong to the strongest songs Warlord ever recorded. A song that is even more of the shelf is “The Rider”. It has more pony than mustang power and fortunately the following “Conquerors” brings the metal train back on track. Still, even the good songs are missing that spark that creates a wow-effect. Similar but different are the Lordian Guard songs of which “Beyond a Pale Horse” opens the album and “Revelation XIX” closes it.

“Free Spirit Soar” is a solid album with a touching background story that may be more important than the result of this endeavor.