Crowbar
Formed: 1991
From:
New Orleans,
LA,
United States
Last Known Status: Active
Crowbar Interviews and Features
Below are our features and interviews with Crowbar.
Interview
Crowbar On Influences, New Music And Phil Anselmo
Over my eleven years with this site, I've had the pleasure and honour of meeting some of my favourite bands and some true legends of metal. On a recent trip back to England, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with another of the genre's most revered musicians, Crowbar frontman Kirk Windstein, who has also garnered attention for his role with bands such as Down with Phil Anselmo of Pantera and Pepper Keenan of Corrosion of Conformity and Kingdom Of Sorrow with Hatebreed frontman, Jamey Jasta.
During the interview we discussed a wide range of topics from the return of bassist to Todd Strange, to the possibility of a new Kingdom Of Sorrow record to the influence of Phil Anselmo. You can check it out below. More...
Interview
Crowbar Discusses "The Serpent Only Lies"
Doom and sludge metal bands weren’t as common in the late eighties as today. Back then bands most often looked to hair metal and thrash for inspiration. New Orleans, Louisiana was no different. When the saints go marching in, they were doing it to the cadence of Exhorder. After a few years, every music genre becomes oversaturated. Thrash was no longer a novelty to friends Kirk Windstein and Jimmy Bower. Instead of worshipping speed, the two went the other direction, one treaded by bands such as Trouble, Saint Vitus, and of course, Black Sabbath.
Down tempos were a major facet of Crowbar’s sound, but they also liked to push the pace with circle-pit inducing hardcore rhythms. You get hit with a bass bomb and then a machine gun blast. Windstein’s vocals were cast from the same cinder blocks as his guitar grooves, resulting in a more aggressive take than any doom band. Crowbar is a band about fighting, but not in the sense of punching some one in the mouth. Their lyrics are about inner conflict, about fighting to overcome adversity. As hard as the band hits, though, melody is also a major tool to express these ideas.
The mix of hardcore, doom and southern rock became known as sludge. Just like many scenes the NOLA scene was built on friends influencing friends, sharing stages and sharing bands. Bower played drums for Crowbar in the early days. Windstein and Bower both also played together in Down. Add Bower’s other band, Eyehategod, and you have the scene that propagated sludge to the world’s masses. If not for bands like these three, sludge wouldn’t experience its current popularity. The sound has evolved into more of a stoner tag, but at the roots were NOLA bands.
In 1993, Down band mate Phil Anselmo helped NOLA sludge climb into the light. Anselmo had made a name for himself singing for Pantera, so the masses noticed when he produced Crowbar’s self-titled album and brought them on tour. He also sported Eyehategod shirts and took them on tour as well. Animated morons Beavis and Butthead watched “Existence is Punishment” and made fun of Crowbar’s weight. The dimwitted duo made fun of a lot of great metal videos—Death “The Philosopher” and Morbid Angel “God of Emptiness” for example. But even negative exposure is still exposure, especially on MTV.
Nearly three decades after they struck their first chord, Crowbar has looked to the past for inspiration. “The Serpent Only Lies” (due October 28th) is a throwback to the band’s early years. Often a band’s early records are fan favorites because those records are fresh and novel. Even though Windstein wrote the way he wanted to write the album, it’s still cool that he did something fans ask for but never get. Bands cringe at the idea of revisiting early records. In the following interview, singer/guitarist/lyricist Kirk Windstein talks about what inspired him to make this record and how their influences help define the band as a whole. More...