The scumdogs of Richmond timed their manifesto with a pollster's cynicism. War Party reached the shops on 26 October 2004, exactly one week before America queued at the ballot box, and its opening track, "Bring Back the Bomb", does not wait for the debate: it tears the bunting off the podium, kicks over the lectern and offers nuclear policy as a campaign pledge, over the hardest riffing GWAR had put on tape in twenty years of existence.
Made in Richmond that spring at WreckRoom Studios, produced, recorded and mixed by Glen Robinson, who had worked the desk for the band on America Must Be Destroyed in 1992, and released on DRT Entertainment as the first GWAR album after more than a decade on Metal Blade, the record is a battle bus with a steel ram welded to the grille, painted in campaign colours and driven straight at the crowd. Eleven stops. Thirty-eight minutes.
"Bring Back the Bomb" sets the terms for everything that follows. The riffs are thrash cut to the bone, the drums run at full velocity without dropping a stroke, and the chorus is built to be bellowed back by a front row dressed for the spray, which is the only laboratory where a GWAR song has ever been tested. It became the record's calling card on stage and was still being fired at the crowd at Wacken in 2022. Nothing about it apologises.
The Antarctic warlords had swapped two of their garrison since Violence Has Arrived in 2001. Cory Smoot now wore the Flattus Maximus costume and Todd Evans the Beefcake the Mighty one, and the change is the first thing the ear registers: the lead guitar stands at the front of the mix with genuine solos in it, and Brad Roberts, behind the Jizmak Da Gusha mask, drums with a precision the band had never quite owned before. "Womb with a View" opens on a lead line before a word is sung, which on a GWAR record of the early nineties would have counted as a scandal. The humour is still there, crude as ever. It simply waits its turn.
The politics arrive in uniform. "Krosstika" names the party's emblem, a cross welded to a swastika, over an opening riff that owes Megadeth and their "Holy Wars" rather more than a thank-you note, and the title track, "War Party", takes its imagery from the Iraq bulletins of 2004 instead of from the band's usual sewer of invention: a corpse dragged through a street, the evening news hammered flat into a thrash beat. Oderus Urungus told OC Weekly, which ran the interview on 25 November 2004, that the record was an indictment of the "stupid human" political process, and Dave Brockie, out of costume in the same conversation, said of the Democrats: "they just lost to the stupidest man in the world. Pathetic!"
The deepest cut is "Bonesnapper (The Faces of the Slain)", which starts at ballad pace, lets a galloping bass line drag it into the verse and then cuts loose a guitar solo, the one place where the record reaches for the drama of traditional heavy metal and gets there. "The Reaganator" is a straight thrasher with a tombstone for a chorus. "The Bonus Plan" hands the microphone to Beefcake for seventy-six seconds of hardcore with the brake lines cut, and it is gone before the guards notice.
Between those sprints the bus runs short of fuel. "Lost God" and the closing "Fistful of Teeth" settle into midpaced riffing that does its job in the room and leaves the memory almost as quickly, and the clean, plain production, which lets every instrument be heard, does nothing to make any of it larger than life. That is the price of the new discipline. A band that once changed genre every third song has bolted itself to one, and the songs that are merely competent now have nowhere to hide behind a joke.
Five monsters went to the polls with a thrash record under each arm, and it is a better record than the joke would ever need to be.
War Party is GWAR's most serious campaign and its heaviest up to that point, a record whose sprints land like a salvo and whose midpaced stretches mostly wave from the window. "Bring Back the Bomb" and "Bonesnapper (The Faces of the Slain)" belong in any honest argument about the band's best songs, and for the first time the playing matches the costumes. Five monsters went to the polls with a thrash record under each arm, and it is a better record than the joke would ever need to be. It is the exact moment GWAR chose to be judged as a metal band first and a stage show second.