Last Updated on July 26, 2023, 7:11 PM | Published: July 26, 2023
A metal mainstay on the Oklahoma City scene for the best part of a decade, and one time practically the house band at Blue Note, Turbo Wizard have carved out a peculiar and unique niche even within the city’s greater metal community.
And that’s because even though there’s a rich and a remarkably active roster of psychedelic metal, stoner rock, and bleeding-heart hardcore acts, there’s still no one in this city that can touch Turbo Wizard on the battlefields of Fantasy Metal.
After nearly seven full years since the band’s self-titled debut album, they’re finally back to defend their kingdom and prove their mettle on brand new EP “Barbarian Love Songs.”
The four-headed riff monster that is Turbo Wizard – comprised of Zak Lindahl, Bradley Nance, Trey Allen, and Loren Williams – remained a constant on the concert scene even without a follow-up release until COVID hit, with only sporadic appearances since.
And then suddenly, all at once, as if summoned by some warlock, there was a brand new studio EP online the morning of July 1st in the form of four-track “Barbarian Love Songs.”
So why the long gap and why the sudden drop?
“We bought some recording equipment and started recording ourselves in 2018, and then COVID happened and threw a wrench into everything,” said drummer Williams. “Everyone in the band started putting more work into their personal goals, so we decided to hire our friend Bobby Parker from Burt Records and the band Salem’s Bend to mix songs while we were working on other things, and eventually settled on releasing these four as an EP.”
It’s interesting to hear that the four tracks collected here were merely selected from a list of unfinished material rather than conceived together as some conceptual showing of doomed, dark magic love, a through-line that the EP’s songs all seem to share.
“That was definitely an afterthought,” Williams told me. “We just put our four favorite recordings together in this collection, but I guess there is a strange theme of possessive, broken-heartedness underlying the songs, though.”
The fact that these tracks all gel so well together without a preconceived cohesion is a testament to just how fully realized and well-formed the Turbo Wizard sound has become.
It’s “throwback” metal, sure, but it’s also a lot more than that, and that’s surely because of the sheer, unbreakable commitment on display in the band.
A collection of big-riff, heavy-beat metal songs about goblins and magic women could so easily be written off as a ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek novelty, but Turbo Wizard approach the subject matter – and more importantly, the relentlessly catchy hard rock behind it all – with a surprising earnestness.
It’s theatrical. It’s operatic. It’s all huge, lushly mixed choral vocal harmonies and soaring, epic guitar solos.
It’s fun in a way that too many hyper-macho, self-serious bands seem afraid to even approach, but strangely, it’s that willingness to have fun that allows them to sell it all with seriousness.
And that’s because Turbo Wizard, perhaps better than even a majority of other modern metal bands, understand the roots and origins of the genre and the elements that grew the original, epic metal innovators.
Primarily, Celtic folk music and medieval mythology.
The great progenitors of hard rock and metal – figures like Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and, maybe even more so, Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple – weren’t pulling their groundbreakingly heavy new sounds from any existing metal influences. They were adding distortion and solos and crushing drum beats to Celtic-style folk songwriting as a way of capturing and conveying the darkness, magic, and mystery in the songs’ stories.
The exact same elements build into the song “Enchantress” here, opening with a lilting, folky acoustic strum that makes it easy to picture a serenading bard spinning a musical tale in some throne room.
As the seven-minute opus develops and opens up into an hellacious, driving metal jam, it never drops its medieval cloak or the inherent storytelling magic at its root. It never shuffles off the classicism for the sake of show-off musicianship or speed demonstrations.
It just keeps getting more epic.
If you can make it through the four tracks of “Barbarian Love Songs” and not find yourself grooving, nodding, or outright banging your head and singing along, then you clearly either have a much stronger restraint or a much colder heart than I do.
Because, personally, I find it hard to believe that this EP didn’t burst into existence from lightning striking a mountaintop somewhere.
It’s just that magical, and it’s just that metal.
“Barbarian Love Songs” by Turbo Wizard is streaming everywhere now.
Follow Turbo Wizard online at facebook.com/turbowizard and on Instragram at @turbowizardband.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
