In a 2019 interview with Machine Music—one of the few he’s ever given—Patrick Walker pushed back on the notion that Warning makes “very loud folk music.” His retort, palpably prickly even in text: “I don’t see that connection there. Warning was very much about riffs, and Watching from a Distance was a metal album.” It’s understandable that Walker’s interlocutor would pursue this line of questioning. Warning’s singular approach to doom metal has a way of making you disbelieve your own ears. On their now-classic sophomore LP, Watching from a Distance, the UK band paired slow, heavy guitar riffs with Walker’s nakedly emotional lyrics and pleading, edge-of-tears vocals, a combination that has long sent listeners scrambling for comparisons to sad-bastard folk, goth rock, and, most perniciously, emo. On a new 20th anniversary reissue, the album sounds as idiosyncratic (and as metal) as ever, and Warning’s confrontational vulnerability feels ahead of its time.
Metalheads have never been afraid of high drama, but they tend to prefer it dressed in the genre’s signature heightened imagery. Iron Maiden will put a lump in your throat, but they’ll do it by convincingly conjuring the last thoughts of a doomed soldier, not by moaning about a breakup. Candlemass broke new ground for histrionics in metal, but their best songs were about demons, sorcerers, and witches. Even My Dying Bride, Warning’s closest spiritual antecedent, have always couched their little-r romantic songs in a lot of big-R Romanticism—the blood, the wine, the roses, and other such gothic Byronisms. Warning have little use for metaphor. Their songs are sad, not with remote, idealized melancholy but with the familiar sadness of the here and now. With an emotional openness that successors like Pallbearer and Spirit Adrift would take and run with, Walker exculpates what’s in his heart and sings it directly into the heart of the listener.
Walker has always been circumspect on what the five long songs on Watching from a Distance are specifically about, but they all seem to deal with the same relationship, observed at different phases but always at a nadir. On the title track, he can observe the object of his attachment only across a great expanse of miscommunication, and on “Faces,” he’s estranged even from himself. “Footprints” cuts its pathos with misdirected anger, while “Echoes” dreams of a reconciliation that the narrator seems to know is impossible. The hardest hitting lines sound like unfiltered thoughts scrawled on napkins, never like poetry tortured into meter: “I am starving in your mystery”; “I don’t know what my heart is anymore”; “I wish you were here with me tonight.” It’s a little embarrassing, but love often is, especially once it’s over. Walker understands that he’s laying it on thick. On “Bridges,” he asks, “Can someone feel too much?” It’s a worthy thesis for the record, and a question it strives to answer in the negative.
Walker’s voice is the perfect vessel for Watching from a Distance’s excess of feeling. He’s as direct and plainspoken as a singer as he is as a writer; an attentive first-time listener could easily transcribe every word on the record. Walker likes to end a line with an unexpected upward inflection, leaving the melodies as unresolved as his narrators’ emotions. At their core, those melodies are resolutely straightforward, the better not to get in the way of the sentiments, and they’re effectively mirrored by Walker’s almost sing-songy guitar riffs. The riffs still manage to come across as crushingly heavy, not because of extreme distortion or envelope-pushing dissonance but because they manage to articulate Walker’s words with such fluidity. His guitar loudly weeps.
