Warlock - Triumph and Agony

By the time Warlock had hit the U.S. in 1987 with its fourth full-length release, Triumph and Agony, we were in dire need of some good AOR-friendly metal, yet heavy and pure enough to retain its underground status. That is not an easy task by any stretch, and while Doro Pesch and company gave it a go major success didn’t happen Stateside like it might have. “All We Are” led the charge to MTV airplay with its catchy sing-a-long title and Doro’s leather-clad body gyrating during a traffic stoppage on a California expressway while she did battle with a warlock. It was shtick at its absolute finest, yet the album as a whole was far more engaging and important than the video might have you think.

Led by Doro Pesch, Warlock powered through albums like Burning the Witches, Hellbound and True as Steel to get us to Triumph and Agony, a powerful, emotional and long-lasting record that is often lost to time and buried in the rivers of great, yet ignored music. While unashamedly heavy, Doro also proves her prowess for the ballad, again sounding more beautiful and serene with the heavy Deutschland accent.  She found the formula to allow a metal band to offer serenity in mental pictures as opposed to a never-ending assault of E power chords that can get pretty dull after, say, the 15-minute mark. The song “Fur Immer” is a haunting journey into a woman’s soul as she professes her love “forever.”  Sung mostly in her native tongue, one can’t help but be moved by the emotional honesty she offers, even if the language might not be understood by us Westerners. The song proves good music does not have to be in a native tongue to move you.  “East Meets West” is a fine effort to bring the walls dividing east and West Germany a couple of years before the first slabs of wall were broken. “Metal Tango” is the obligatory “in-your-face” anthem to rally the metal troops and find that heavy metal fire inside you. While seemingly cliché, don’t be fooled: the intricate musical scenery is enough to move you. “Kiss of Death,” “Three-Minute Warning,” “I Rule the Ruins,” “Touch of Evil” and “Cold, Cold World” round out this oft-overlooked masterpiece.  Not one song on here is a throw-away, not one can be dismissed as filler. The late 80s saw the core of metal overtaken by hair bands and glam rockers as MTV saw fit to dilute the water, but Triumph and Agony was one of the albums that fought the good fight and attempted to keep the proverbial fire burning.

Triumph and Agony is an album simply rife with crunching riffs and lyrical fantasies on both the cerebral and emotional plane. How could one not hear Pesch’s voice literally overpowering the dark wizard she fights off in the video and fall in immediate love with her?  When Doro tells the story of uniting on a battlefield to raise the chosen music to high position it’s both believable and empowering.  Her German accent, while noticeable, is not so heavy that you can’t decipher her lyrics; in fact, it lends credence to her credibility as a European metalhead fighting to free American from the pop-tyranny of Madonna’s True Blue and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. She was seemingly out there for all of us who desperately needed a feminine voice to guide us, though she was hardly the tame, timid lion cub. What she and Warlock produced here as nothing short of strength and power through honest German metal music without all of muss.

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Germany had a pretty good scene going for it back in the day.  The late 70s saw the rise of the Scorpions, which was as close as we could come to “true” metal until the early 80s saw bands such as Sodom, Kreator, Destruction and Helloween break through the American barriers and infect young metal fans with a fast, blazing sound that was both infectious and leaps over the Sabbathy-sludge that started it all. The one thing all of these good German exports had in common, as with most bands of the time, was that they were all male-fronted efforts; the medium for women in rock was left sorely empty save for Pat Benatar and Deborah Harry. Metal had its female rockers in Lita Ford, Lee Aaron from Canada and the late Dawn Crosby, but, sadly, none made a mark larger than the T&A pin-ups on a young metalhead’s wall.

Warlock hailed from Germany and featured a tiny blond bombshell and former model named Dorothee Pesch, better known today as Doro. While small and very soft-spoken, the minute the lady opened her mouth the gates of heavy metal Valhalla seemed to smile and scream. She was Rob Halford, Freddie Mercury and Aphrodite rolled into one German powerhouse that managed to release four stellar offerings before Doro ventured into a successful solo career. The music was not speed metal, but ventured into the “power-metal” vein long before it became the cliché it is today. While hard and heavy, it was not obtrusive or pedestrian by any means and it was a very fine line between speed and power that is still utilized to this day.

I was fortunate enough to have seen Warlock open for Megadeth and share the same stage with a pre-Nevermore Sanctuary at the Aragon Ballroom on a hot May evening back in ’88. I had been a fan of Warlock some four years earlier when I found the band’s 7” single for “Without You” at a downtown record store and bought it on a whim; I was hooked. This gorgeous woman had the voice of a hundred men, even stronger, and for the last 26-years I’ve followed Ms. Pesch all over the board with her releases. So you can imagine my shock and disbelief when Doro is up on the Aragon stage ripping through “Cold, Cold World” and “I Rule the Ruins” to the chants of “Show us your tits!” What fools these mortals be. Ms. Pesch, to me, transcends the eye appeal, outlasts the leather pants and resonates far longer than some drunken morons wailing for sexual stimulants to combat their overuse of social chemical stimuli. She looked wonderful, sexy, and still does today: blonde, blue-eyed, German accent, soft-spoken; she was a dream come true for the American metalhead, but she is often unfairly relegated to orgasmic fodder. Doro Pesch has had to venture into territory even Ms. Harry never found herself in. She has had to not only win over the metal contingency that is sickeningly misogynistic and close-minded, but make her mark even deeper than anyone else, male or female, when clearly there is literally no other woman in metal history, past or present, that is as powerful a vocalist as Doro Pesch. She did not set the standard…she is the standard, and always will be.

Triumph and Agony is a part of my youth as much as any other classic album I’ve reviewed, but it stands taller than most for many reasons, chief among them that I simply have never gotten chills up my back like I still get when Ms. Pesch screams through “Touch of Evil”. What proves to be one of the more incredible performances in metal history makes me realize that there is no better female vocal for the metal scene. I played this album constantly back when it came out and it finds its way into my players now and again. It holds as one of the finest moments in power metal, TRUE power metal history.                          

Release Date: September 29, 1987
Label: Mercury Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  All We Are
2.  Three Minute Warning
3.  I Rule the Ruins
4.  Kiss of Death
5.  Make Time for Love
6.  East Meets West
7.  Touch of Evil
8.  Metal Tango
9.  Cold, Cold World
10.  Für Immer

Total playing time:  39:49

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Classic Review

December 8, 2010

Reviewer: Chris