(6) "The Losers" - "The Losers" isn't the best Warrior Soul song, just the one I would die for. First off, forget about the ill-fated Classics re-recording, and head back to Last Decade Dead Century. Listen for the ominous rat-tat-tat of the drums. I can still remember the day I first heard it: emanating out of my TV with this presence. Of the famous movie line, "You had me at hello," Kory had me at "Have you ever wanted to be/someone you're not/then you look into the world/and see what you've got." Most people assume if they are down, they must be out. On "The Losers," Kory set about to change that. You forget what a pure singer he was in the early going, when his voice had less road gravel. So Kory hits the first chorus, and he's singing "Here's to the losers/the substance abusers/to the reeeejects/and the imperfects/'cause I think you're beautiful." I'm guessing these words don't have the power on paper that they do on record, so you'll just have to lay your hands on it. Acceptance of the status quo is about forgetting; "The Losers" is about remembering. It's easy as death to judge yourself by all the things you don't have. So how do you handicap life based on accumulated self-hatred? The beauty of the American Dream is that nothing is set in stone, but Kory felt both sides of that dream. Fuck the bootstraps: life serves some people caviar and some people dirt, and when you're served enough dirt, you start to believe you ordered it. I guess it makes sense that a song about the beauty of the imperfect is both of those things. "The Losers" achieves everything it needs to by the first chorus, so it's downhill from there - though it's a gentle slope, not a steep dropoff. Perhaps like us, "The Losers" yearns for an ass-kick ending it doesn’t achieve. Sometimes it's hard to live up to yourself, but "The Losers" is still unique, a song that was written for everyone but ultimately just for you.

(7) "The Pretty Faces" - This song violates the first law of punk metal: thou shalt not linger. "The Pretty Faces" takes some brilliant material and beats it once too often. But this Space Age Playboys standout survives the curse of longevity by mooching off one of Kory's most piercing lines ("You love the pretty faces/you put your pretty faith in"). There's not much more to it, but then again, what else is there to say? Oh, and is there a better summary of America's cultural direction than "makin' love on a one way jet ride"? True to cyberpunk form, there's no guitar solo in this one, but there is a heck of a bridge, with Kory going off on media mind control: "It's not reality man/just because it's American man/you think we're going somewhere/but we've already been there." Then it's back to the pretty faces and the pretty faith and the blindness of our self-infatuation. As Kory shouts "It's not reality man!" with a mixture of rage and disdain, we can understand why he decided to become a space age playboy rather than try to rally the media-drunk American consumer.

(8) "Last Decade Dead Century" - We've gone too long without a mention of bassist Pete McClanahan. Pete's perfect bass lines are a big part of the greatness of Warrior Soul. "Last Decade Dead Century" is one fine example of what Pete is capable of. Drummer Mark Evans (RIP) is in a zone too, playing off Pete with a nifty off-beat rhythm that carries us through this tour of the almost-damned. You can't find this song on the album that carries its name - to get your hands on it, you have to pick up the fine rarities collection Odds 'N Ends, which pulls together a lot of underrated material, escorted by some hand-scrawled liner notes from Kory Clarke. Though I've put this song eighth in the mix, that doesn't mean I consider "Last Decade" to be the eighth best Warrior Soul song. Mixes require pacing, and what we get from "Last Decade" is a change-of-pace groove sprinkled with some of Kory's sharpest lyrics about the "freeway of extinction." It would be a misconception to say that Kory was driven by a hatred of the Bush regime, as the title of the track "Four More Years" elsewhere on Last Decade Dead Century seems to imply. Kory didn't attend any of George Bush senior's fundraisers, that's for sure, but Warrior Soul is not about political change, or even revolution, as much as it's about the apocalypse. Give small minds big guns and you better run for cover. The flaws in society are flaws in human nature, and thus "man will change or he is dead." "Last Decade Dead Century" scorns reform ("regress/progress/no distinction") and lays down the worst case scenario on top of a late night beat. One thing that always strikes me about this song: just when we begin to cross over from sharp critique to cynical tirade, Kory turns it back on himself with the pivotal line "can you love me?" By exposing his own hunger, Kory avoids the stilted caricature of the ideologue in favor of the imperfect warrior, breaking away from a lockstep march in order to reckon with his own emotional poverty, or as he would write years later, with his own "rotten soul."

(9) "The Drug" - Space Age Playboys is a guided tour of all the lovely ways we can tune out while other people die on our behalf. Such a tour would not be complete without a nod to the escapist merits of love, and that's where "The Drug" comes in. There's no real love left on Space Age Playboys, just junkies doing it in a bathroom stall. And if those junkies think they are finding some kind of "Leaving Las Vegas"-style redemption, Kory begs to differ, because love is just another drug. This is how the bitterness on Space Age Playboys seeps beneath the political; it turns out that the that personal betrayals are harder to bear than the political ones. "The Drug" is the final nail in Space Age Playboys' post-modern coffin. In the absence of misguided hope, we are now free to pursue our own immolation. Escape may be the best solace after all. The truth doesn't always set you free - it can only serve that function if it opens up a way out that you haven't already tried. The Space Age Playboys pushes you from the stagnation of despair into an ahistorical pleasure zone. You might lose your soul in such a party, but it also buys some time. Meanwhile, there is the comfort of non-conformity and the delirium of great rock and roll. And "The Drug" is just that.

(10) "Television" - More apocalyptic channel-surfing from the Space Age Playboys album, "Television" is a great song with an even better one trapped inside it. The rule on Space Age Playboys was to soften the lyrical bite with a psychedelic flow, so a song that could have been a devastating indictment of media mind-warping becomes a rock and roll drive-by. But "Television" still has the post-industrial swagger that makes Space Age Playboys a special (and especially relentless) record. When Warrior Soul became cyber punks, they burned the chips on their shoulders in a huge pile. "Television" broadcasts that moment as well as any song on the album, and ends with the punk abruptness we wanted (but didn't get) on "Pretty Faces." Space Age Playboys has Warrior Soul reveling in amorality like they never had a care. Unfortunately, acting like rock stars didn't turn them into ones, but then again, most rock stars don't make records this good. Space Age Playboys was Warrior Soul's last party, and they were damned sure going to make the most of it.

(11) "Four More Years" - I couldn't make a better case for Warrior Soul's break-the-mold tendencies than "Four More Years," a devastating spoken word poem from Last Decade Dead Century. How many metal bands signed a major label deal and then, in between video shoots, slapped some spoken word poetry on their record - much less a piece that challenges the listener's own self-satisfaction? ("Have you eaten today? I am glad. Your digestion is the sorrow of the hungry.") Small concession: Kory did take on a cynical, affected persona and added some jungle noise to make "Four More Years" seem a bit more hip. But eventually he busts out, and by the end of this poem Kory is naked again, howling against all that is and should not be, not as a macho warrior but as one of us - broken, lost, beaten. Such a conclusion is not anticipated - "Four More Years" starts off on shaky footing, with Kory making one of his excessive references to children (Kory had this bad habit of referring to our generation as the "children" of a new social movement in the [ugghh] "dawn of a new age"). But as we move along, the intensity builds, with Kory memorably defining America as: "pig city oil creation/over sex-dosed/ the junk machine crawls." That zinger is soon followed by "The claws of the predatory corporation dig deep into the naïve religion culture." Guess that just about sums it up. But in the end, personal and political despair are as one: "The heart goes forward hating/wanting life that cannot be attained... I want the world to heal/I want the world to love/but it cannot. Four more years, Four more years..." Sometimes the best way out of the bleakness is to write about it. Kory was never the best rock poet, but he wrote his way out of some pretty tough spots. Say what you want about Kory; at least he wasn't a psycho-creation of some marketing department. These days, the NuMetal crowd shows off their calculated, directionless rage because it is fashionable. These guys have some pretty cool tattoos, I'll give you that, but they are cultural marionettes in a corporate puppet show. I'm sure these sackless fellows will be showing up any day to beat the living crap out of me, but I'd rather get beaten up by NuMetal chumps than spend my music career sucking the nipple of Clear Channel Communications. Kory wasn't mad because he hoped it would sell records, he was mad because he was full of wrath. So he found a direction by turning the stage into a witness stand. When his record label objected, he walked away from the stardom they dangled, but not before unleashing a few more sonic booms. I judge poetry, and art in general, by two main criteria: aesthetics and guts. Sure, you could make a list of songwriters with more lyrical grace than Kory (though in the metal world, that list would be pretty short), but how many had more guts? Pretty pop ditties are fine for some, but if you puke up whenever you hear the songs of your youth being appropriated to market cars, razors, and basketball sneakers, then Kory is your man.

(12) "Rotten Soul" - "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" - that's a pretty good summary of the sentiments of "Rotten Soul," a blistering self-indictment that mock-celebrates the depraved side of urban life, where pleasure gets wrapped in addiction and the void gets bigger each time it is filled. "Rotten Soul" is the worst of the best songs on Space Age Playboys, rounding out a blistering collection that sounds as fresh now as it did in 1995. (I should mention that after Warrior Soul broke up in '95, Kory went on to release a couple albums with a new band, Space Age Playboys, that extended this musical direction. But that band is not to be confused by the Warrior Soul studio album of the same name.) "Rotten Soul" has the frenzied determination of a junkie looking for a fix. A defining moment for any social critic is that terrible day when we realize that the corruption we despise outside ourselves is also a mirror image of our own accumulated damage. I’m not sure if Kory is trying to take a hard look in the mirror or just trying to spit out some bile, but he needed an outlet for the ugliness, and "Rotten Soul" provided it.

(13) "Superpower Dreamland" - Don't be misled by the appearance of this song at spot number thirteen, "Superpower Dreamland" is one of the greatest of all Warrior Soul songs. "We're living in a dreamland!" is the message here, and it arrives on a freight train. Skip the original version on Last Decade Dead Century, and head directly to the amped-up version on Classics. The guys just nailed this one; the riff is heavy enough to scare iPod toting pedestrians straining to hear Lenny Kravitz. Disregard Kory's New Age children in verse one, as in "the children are angry," and head into the meat of the song... "busted in dreamland, the country rots!" and now we're on surer footing - we're in "Superpower Dreamland" baby, where products are cheap, freedom is relative, and Warrior Soul has a little something for us.

(14) "American" - This snippet from Odds 'N Ends is more of an afterthought than a complete song, but it's always intrigued me, in a "What happens when Jane's Addiction meets Billy Bragg?" kind of way. "American" is another Warrior Soul meditation on the great American Blind Spot. You basically sit down with Kory and his guitar on this one, listening in as he reckons with America's self-image from the vantage point of how we must appear to a space alien or perhaps an illegal alien, someone that sees us as an outsider would; someone who experiences America as a foot on the neck instead of a convenient spread of goods and services. This is familiar territory for Kory, but I like the "4 track basement studio" vibe, and towards the end of the song, we hit one of his most important lines. The problem is that I can't verify each word, and no lyrics to "American" have ever been published (that I know of). As things are wrapping up, Kory says (best I can make out) "American dream became true/oh you see yourself cry." It seems like nothing on paper, but in real time it sounds different, like if you decipher every word, you'll solve the secret message inside the Warrior Soul decoder ring. Maybe the secret message is simply that most dreams big enough to live by carry an undertow of sorrow for those who enabled your greatness but could not partake in it. America only has so many life preservers; chasing dreams in the belly of empires is risky business. Kory seemed to understand that there is always a price - he wrote this song for those who haven't paid it yet.

(15) "Punk and Belligerent" - "I'm a punk, and I’m belligerent, and I don't give a, give a, give a, give a... shit!" belts Kory in the midst of the Warrior Soul classic known as "Punk and Belligerent." The title suits Warrior Soul perfectly: the "punk" symbolizing attitude for attitude's sake, and the "belligerent" proving that intelligent rage is a lot more effective - and a lot sexier - than a bar brawl. Pass over the version on Salutations and refer again to the Classics album, where you'll find a truly belligerent version. "Punk and Belligerent" starts off with the bluster of a neighborhood punk caught in a drug bust, but then you get to the last verse, and you realize that this punk has been studying up. He's not looking to punk you up - he's got his sights on a more ambitious target: "all the fat fucks on Capitol Hill." No squabbles over dimebags here, this dude's got his eyes peeled for the "DEA cover" that's gonna shoot him down. No one, least of all Kory, thought the solution to our problems was to spend our lives ducking DEA choppers. Kory was more interested in provoking people out of their detachment; he could work with their reaction better than their silence. "Punk and Belligerent" definitely provokes a reaction, but in the end, it's just a great rock song with huge attitude.

(16) "Song in Your Mind" - Warrior Soul didn't always have to rock out. They mixed it up with the best of them, and this collection doesn't really do justice to their range. Warrior Soul were not your "toss in a power ballad" guys. They did record two love songs (and brilliant ones at that), but they mostly used the slowdown to get darker, not sappier. Warrior Soul wasn't afraid to get into a groove and push past the five or six minute mark. Tough choices: "Song in Your Mind" gets the decision here, a hypnotic sway powered by another compelling base line from Pete McClanahan. "Song in Your Mind" is one of the prettiest of all Warrior Soul songs - as much as Kory was about the drugs and the sex and the revolt, he was also about making emotionally honest music, whether what he was feeling was cool or not. With "Song in Your Mind," we get an elegant expression of longing. This is the first song in the collection from Chill Pill (Chill Pill will be better represented in my volume II collection). Their fourth (and last) studio album, Chill Pill was torn by conflicting agendas: one the one hand, to be a fine creative experiment for its own sake, on the other, to be an esoteric parting shot to David Geffen and his fellow suits at Geffen records. I'm not going to try to analyze the "he said/he said" aspects of Warrior Soul's major label meltdown. It would be foolish to claim that Warrior Soul should have "made nice" with its label; it would also be foolish to argue that a band as incendiary as Warrior Soul belonged on a major label in the first place. You can say almost anything on a record, but you never bite the hand that feeds you. Warrior Soul didn't bother with that distinction, and it may have cost them a career. Had they conceded, they might have made a pile of dough, but they would have also become Warriors without Souls. Perhaps it dawned on them during the recording of Chill Pill: Warrior Soul was always meant to fly free and low to the ground. After Chill Pill, they got their wish - though they imploded too soon to take full advantage of their newfound freedom. Fans' opinions of Chill Pill are mixed: some call it Warrior Soul's finest hour, others dismiss it as a spitwad for David Geffen. The verdict falls somewhere in the middle. Chill Pill isn't Warrior Soul's best album, but it's just as necessary as any of the others. It is, however, a misconception to portray Chill Pill as the Warrior Soul album that was "off the beaten track." Every Warrior Soul album, with the possible exception of Space Age Playboys, has at least a couple songs that are far off the metal grid. Not all of these experiments are successful, but the variety is always welcome. "Song in Your Mind" is one of the most graceful of these, a jazzy-blue love song lined with distortion. There is something expansive about "Song in Your Mind.” It’s as if Kory stepped away from the punks and the belligerent and took a view from the mountaintop. He can see the city throbbing in the distance, but for these five minutes, he can also see beyond the city, and he can sense a love out there that's bigger than whatever most of us settle for. While I wrote this, I learned that Warrior Soul's ex-drummer Mark Evans was brutally murdered in London last January. I'll listen to "Song in Your Mind" tonight with Mark in my thoughts... "An empty sky looks at me/this long course forgiven/all I wanted to be/like autumn leaves all falling downward."

(17) "Fightin' the War" - "Fightin' the War" could have been a monster song, but it got its wings clipped by some of Kory's sloppiest lyrics. This may have been a case of too little, too late - "Fightin' the War" is the last song on Space Age Playboys, an album that probably exceeded itself by several songs. Perhaps "Fightin' the War" was an afterthought, or perhaps its rabble-rousing sentiments didn't quite jive with the "cyber playboy" persona. But we do know that when Kory chooses to repeat a verse in the same song that we're on shakier ground that usual. And it doesn't help that the verse in question is closer to anti-social babble than coherent thought: " All of the little boys/chase little girls down/I just want to ride/the earth around the sun." What a stark contrast from the lyrical heights just achieved in "Song in Your Mind." But that's how it goes sometimes with Warrior Soul - you take it all, or not at all. It's a shame, because with the inspired chorus, the song goes exactly where Kory's lyrics didn't. If you can look beyond the defects and feel the glowing rebel heart of this song, you've got a vintage Warrior Soul moment. "Fightin' The War" still makes the cut on the first CD, but a few more days of songwriting polish might have turned it into an all-time great.
-----

Final notes: So ends the first in a series of articles on Warrior Soul - a band whose stature far exceeds whatever online coverage you can find on them now. The next piece will be the liner notes for Warrior Soul's Best, Volume II. I've held out some of their best songs for inclusion on the second collection, so it's by no means a second tier compilation. And for some reason, the second mix does a better job of capturing the band's range - plus I tossed in a couple of rare Space Age Playboys (the band) tracks. While I work on that second collection, I welcome your comments and feedback on round one.

If readers are curious to hear a more detailed review of my "best bands of the 90s," then let me know and I can elaborate. After Warrior Soul, my next tier would be Alice in Chains, Buffalo Tom, and Jane's Addiction, with a slight edge to Jane's Addiction these days, and one rung below that is Soundgarden and Nirvana. U2 put out (perhaps) the best album of the early '90s in Achtung Baby, but then lost creative momentum. A younger generation has schooled me in Blind Melon, and they're on my list but not near the top yet. There was also a great surge of women in rock, with some fantastic work from Hole and Alanis, but again, nothing was sustained. Finally, it occurred to me that I had overlooked Megadeth, which is my fourth favorite band (one tier below Hanoi Rocks, Warrior Soul, and Metallica). I could see an argument for Megadeth as the best band of the '90s - they put out four very strong albums, Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction, Youthanasia, and Cryptic Writings, and pretty much held their own throughout the decade while expanding their creative reach. I'm not sure why I don't look at Megadeth as a '90s band - I think it's because their roots are in the thrash metal of the mid-to-late '80s. Part of the issue may be that as brilliant as Dave Mustaine is, he is sometimes too insular to love. In the end, Warrior Soul evokes more emotion. They help me to turn bleakness into an edge I can use in the world. Without insulting Megadeth, that puts Warrior Soul in a different class.
-----