Review Fix Exclusive: Interview With Warbringer’s Carlos Cruz

Roughly an hour before showtime, Carlos Cruz stands outside by Warbringer’s tour bus, but not too far. He’s conversing with fans and having a great time on the road. Cruz is Warbringer’s newest member – and their third drummer, but from his attitude and personality, you’d never know he hasn’t always been there. Review Fix was able to grab a few minutes from the master blaster to talk about his acceptance to the band, the state of his previous band, Hexen, and his life as a drummer.

Review Fix: How long have you been playing drums?

Carlos Cruz: Nearly 10 years now, going on 11. My father’s a musician, my sister’s a musician and my grandfather was a musician, so it’s in my DNA. I can also play guitar, bass guitar, acoustic guitar and jazz piano. You could say I dabble in everything.

Review Fix: What are your influences?

Cruz: With the drums, it depends on the time period – where I was at the time. When I was starting out, it was pretty much the heavy scene of the early millennium. Things like Linkin Park, Slipknot, System of a Down, things my older sister was listening to. Then I got into punk rock/heavy metal music, so Lars Urich from Metallica. Then it got into a progressive phase with people like Gar Samuelson and Mike Portnoy. Now, it’s been more jazz influenced/Spanish/Latin percussion influences and old school death metal so it really all just depends.

Review Fix: How did you get approached by Warbringer to join?

Cruz: The first time to be honest it was 2008 and they had just finished touring the “World Without End” record and they approached me because their drummer then I suppose didn’t like the touring life and he just wanted a stable job and they approached me then to join. I was 17 and I didn’t know how to drive or anything so I didn’t feel I was ready for it. Then it was this past year. I had a few personal things happen and it didn’t work too well with the downfall of my previous band. So, when Warbringer was gonna go through another lineup change they approached me in November of 2010 with the offer. Originally Jon Laux asked me to jam to see how it felt and maybe to just drum on the record and if I wasn’t interested they would just find someone else. So the first initial reaction was “Can I play with these guys?” Then that was the offer.

Review Fix: What was the first jam like?

Cruz: The first jam was great. The very first initial jam was just me and the guitarist John Laux by ourselves and we kind of just meddled around. It was formal. We didn’t go into any Warbringer songs. We just jammed/free balled it and about an hour later it was “What Warbringer songs do you know?” and off the top of my head without ever reahearsing with the band themselves I played through maybe eight songs just for fun and they went very well. Then maybe a week or two later the whole band came in and we played a full 11 or 12 song set.

Review Fix: Was recording with Warbringer different from Hexen?

Cruz: Completely different. My previous band was a very technical band. They liked to have everything on a grid. They liked to write their songs on a computer program and take that template and record the songs to them. This time it was very organic. Very natural in a sense where we got together in a room to write the album in a rehearsal and recording studio. The producer sat down with his own metronome and we played the songs naturally – the way we would live. He would average out the tempo for each riff with his metronome and we tracked it to that. When I was recording drums, I was recording with the other four members with a full band live recording.

Review Fix: What was your first kit?

Cruz: The one I actually have now that I’m still playing. I’ve had it for 10, maybe 12 years almost. They belong to my older sister. I just suped it up and built a rack around it and bought more cymbals. It’s a Remo kit and they don’t really make drum sets. It’s a custom set my sister was given way long ago. The finish looks like the bud light can where its like blue so, its pretty cool.

Review Fix: Do you have any non-metal influences?

Cruz: Yes of course. Starting out, listening to music when I was younger it was mainstream pop because I was young and I have older sisters who were into whatever MTV was putting out there. Once MTV started to get heavier with Slipknot and System of a Down, I got into that and then it finally came to the high school heavy metal phase. Nowadays, not that it’s a headache, but I like to expand on my musicianship. I like to listen to other types of music, whether it be classic rock like Thin Lizzy, or Led Zeppelin, or go into some new wave stuff like MGMT or the Black Keys. Or some early ’90s stuff like Nirvana and the White Stripes. And there’s some psychedelic groups that have kind of fused some heavy elements and non heavy elements like Coheed and Cambria or the Mars Volta, Circa Survive. It just depends on what kind of mood I’m in.

Review Fix: How did it change from being on a smaller label with Hexen to a larger label with Warbringer?

Cruz: It was a lot of do it yourself work when I was in Hexen. It was a lot of me personally going out to hang out with all the other bands so I could say “What’s up” to them as a friend and then pull out my record and say “Hey this is my band, check it out.” So, with the old label with Hexen that released our first album, it was Old School Metal Records and then around September/October 2010 when we were about to record the follow up album, we got signed to a slightly bigger label that had Amon Amarth on it before they got signed and blew up. Again it was DIY work. They would distribute as much as they could, either with iTunes or the internet, which was a big source. Once in a while, I showed up at Amoeba and they had the Hexen record, but it was very DIY. Maybe shows and touring was always the answer in heavy metal. But now it’s different. For example, I walked into Best Buy the other day to purchase my new album with Warbringer and I bought every copy they had and gave them to my parents to show them this is the work I’m doing now and it has the Best Buy sticker and not many people can say that they’ve achieved that.

Review Fix: Did you play on the new Hexen album that has yet to be released?

Cruz: Yes. I played on both the first one “State of Insurgency” and on the new one – the follow up record that will hopefully be out by the new year.

Review Fix: Hexen was also gaining a lot of momentum such as being originally billed as support for the Death Angel tour earlier this year but soon were dropped and lost all that momentum. What happened?

Cruz: I personally at that time was going through a lot of things at that time. I’ve shared them before and I’ll share them with you, so it’s not a problem. Due to the economic fall, everyone started losing homes and money and my family lost our home. At the same time, my mother was going in and out of the hospital. She was diagnosed with cancer and on top of that, the Hexen thing started to look negative to me. People were fighting a lot and there was a lot of disagreement. The thing that kept it together was how great we felt the music was. We felt the music was above and beyond anything happening in the scene and we were so proud of it. Yet with the negative fall of the home life, there was so much negativity around me personally. I just wanted to start over. So when we were first approached with the Death Angel tour and a new label, and a new album, momentum was happening so the band had to make a decision and half the band wanted to continue their schooling and their University education and the other half didn’t take it that far. It was “Do we tour and tackle this band thing full- on, or do we maintain our personal lives?” And that was the choice that they made, and it was a beautiful thing that they needed to partake in. To finish their education and get their degrees because everybody was growing up. They’re adults. Everyone has to make a career descision and they chose school and I parted ways and had to restart. Now my home life is perfect and here I am now with a new life, a new band, and new record. Everything’s great.

Review Fix: You wrote several of the songs on the new album, being a new member, how did that come across and was it a difficult task to confront Warbringer with?

Cruz: Surprisingly, the rest of Warbringer was really open to having a new member’s input. What I told them was “If I’m in your band I’m gonna be full-on. I’m not gonna be a “drummer for hire.” I’m gonna be a full-on member and I’m gonna work my ass off to get where I want to get personally and take the band with me. The way I was functioning in Hexen was the way I brought it into Warbringer. In Hexen on the second album that should be out I wrote a majority of those songs on guitar. I composed different synthesizer parts. I composed different elements that weren’t just generic thrash metal anymore. Like I said at the beginning of the interview I play different instruments. So I was able to just compose music. With Warbringer it was the same idea. I had written a song and I had just presented it to them. I had written it down and they were open minded enough to accept it. They said “Lets learn this and see where we can take this and if we can write something out of it great and if not maybe tackle it later.” The song I got to write is on this album its track seven. I believe its called “Echoes From the Void” and the instrumental track is track nine. I wrote this with the guitarist Adam (Carroll). He played piano on it and I played all the guitar parts. It was really just instead of making another thrash metal record 20 years after thrash’s inception, we wanted to push it and open some more doors and give it some more character and some more dynamics. So pretty much just being open minded to that was the biggest key.

Review Fix: What’s your favorite style of drums to play?

Cruz: I love playing on really small drum sets weather it’s just a three piece kit like a snare, a kick drum and an open hi hat. Or a four piece drum set, or maybe a Ringo Starr or John Bonham kind of drum set. I love playing whats called “Gospel Chops.” It’s all these African/Black American drummers that play for their church, but the licks that they play are just unbelievable. They don’t use double pedals but they can do everything that somebody with a double pedal can do with just one foot and its unbelievable. That’s my personal taste, but playing with Warbringer live every night is one: one good exercise, and two: its just so much fun because there’s just so much energy flowing. At home I can just doodle with myself as much a guitar player would. Just play something different but that’s definitely a plus.

Review Fix: Being from the Bay Area, what are some of the bands from the scene today that you enjoy?

Cruz: Today there’s a handful that are really sticking out. Some that I wish were doing a lot more than they are, personally. I think they deserve a lot more because of the quality of the music. One of them would be our friends from San Bernardino called Witchaven. They’re fusing old school punk and crust and straight froward energetic thrash metal with black metal influences like Bathory and they’re great. Another band, complete space heads, sci-fi ’till you die- Vektor from Mesa, Arizona. Those guys, their first record “Black Future” was amazing and I think their follow up record should be out soon. I’m looking forward to that.