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Woe of Tyrants

By Steven Patrick

Even in a world where usually the least musically talented individuals somehow manage to get huge record deals, occasionally there are beacons of justice that shine on truly gifted people, no matter where they are from. Woe of Tyrants, a thrash metal band from little old Chillicothe, OH, is one such example of how hard work and determination can really pay off. After countless hours of practicing their craft and writing killer new material, the band put their hard work onto their MySpace page, where it caught the attention of Tribunal Records. This led to the band being signed for a one-album deal, just to test the waters, so to speak.

Following the 2007 release of their debut album "Behold the Lion," the buzz surrounding Woe of Tyrants continued to grow amongst the metal community. It grew so much, in fact, that the band was successfully picked up by the legendary Metal Blade Records and have completed work on their sophomore album. To put this in perspective for those who haven't heard of Metal Blade, the label has been the home to King Diamond, GWAR, Amon Amarth, The Black Dahlia Murder, As I Lay Dying, Cannibal Corpse, Goatwhore, Job For A Cowboy, Lizzy Borden, Unearth, Cradle of Filth, King's X, Lamb of God, Voivod, and a little-known metal band called Slayer. Basically, the label has represented some of the best metal music in the past three decades.

Vocalist Chris Catanzaro took some time to talk about the his vocal roots, the trials of being a fledgling band on tour, and the recording of Woe of Tyrant's upcoming Metal Blade debut, "Kingdom of Might":

UW: Who would you say has influenced you the most vocally?

Man, this is hard for me because I honestly like…*laughs*…I guess I'm not standard in the sense that I don't listen to heavy music as much. I love metal, but it's really hard when you're in a band…it's tough to listen to that style of music, just because you find yourself wanting to compare everything. It becomes more of a critiquing process. I've always enjoyed Randy Blythe from Lamb of God's vocals. I've always thought he was very creative in the way that he cut up his patterns. Uh, Decapitated. Decapitated's a huge influence on me.

UW: Was there a conscious effort to bring thrash to the forefront in W.O.T.'s music?

Honestly, man, we just love old metal. We love Testament, we love Metallica. Like, I'm not afraid to say I love Metallica. I'm not afraid to say I love Metallica's new album, because I do. I think it's great. We knew we had to put something fresh on it, but honestly, when we write we don't go into it with any formula. We don't go into it like, "Okay, we need this amount of solos, this amount of blast beats, this amount of thrashy beats," or whatever. We just go into it like this is what we like to play, what we like to listen to so this is what we're gonna do. We all have really different taste in music, but foundationally our main influence is '80s thrash metal. That's when it was pure.

UW: What's the band's writing process like?

We were really stressed writing this album for Metal Blade because we had just written an album. So we had just used all our new material on "Behold the Lion," and then Metal Blade was like, "Well, now you have to write one for us," and this was two months after we released that album. So that was like, really stressful for us. We had deadlines and everything that we had to hit. We practiced probably like five days a week, just me and my lead guitar player and my drummer working on writing for the record. Basically, we wanted to put everything we had into it. It comes out Jan. 6…gotta put a cheap plug in. *laughs*

UW: So what's it like being from Chillicothe and being signed to the same label that first signed Slayer?

It means a lot to me in the sense that I'm happy we're on Metal Blade, but also there's a certain humility that has to come with that in that being on Metal Blade doesn't make your career. We've all grown up knowing that we were going to have to bust our balls to even have a shot because we're from Chillicothe. If you're from Boston, you're from Chicago…you've got venues everywhere that you can play, you've got competition with other bands that kind of help sharpen you and make you have to work harder. But in Chillicothe, basically we just had to lock ourselves away in a room and learn how to play our instruments as well as we possibly could, and just try and get out there. The MySpace thing kinda helps because any band from any po'dunk town in the world can get heard, because the Internet has pretty much taken over. Fifteen years ago, where you were from was crucial. Bands had to move just to get a shot…had to move to a bigger city. Now, because of the Internet, it's so easy for anybody to get heard. I think the Internet helps so much with bands that are from smaller towns. I think it helps us more than it helps bands in bigger cities, because we've never had that luxury of having the world have access to our music.

Woe of Tyrants will be performing at the Billiard Club on Saturday, Nov. 1, at 8 p.m. For more information, please visit www.myspace.com/wot

Originally Published: October 29, 2008

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