There's an interesting dichotomy of opinions in the Wovenwar camp about their former bandmate in As I Lay Dying, Tim Lambesis. Lambesis was arrested and eventually convicted of solicitation of murder after attempting to hire a hitman to murder his wife. At the time, the remaining members of the band dissolved the group, and formed Wovenwar with new vocalist Shane Blay.
With Wovenwar's sophmore album, Honor Is Dead, coming out today, the band has been doing press, and earlier this week guitarist Nick Hipa said in an interview that he didn't think much has changed for Lambesis, and that he still sees himself as the victim. The words he had for Lambesis were not exactly friendly, and he clearly holds some ill will for how Lambesis represented himself to the press. But drummer Jordan Mancino does not seem to hold the same amount of ill-will.
In a new interview on the MetalSucks podcast, Mancino said as much when asked if he's communicated with Lambesis:
“No. I haven’t. I’ve been quite busy with the new band… [but] there’s no ill will at this point… It’s definitely something you have to deal with… [but] that’s not to say we’ll never talk again. Like I said, I have no ill will towards him. I hope he’s doing better… you read those news stories like the one that just came out [about Lambesis filing a lawsuit regarding his growth of man boobs] and you’re like, well… It’s hard to know where a person’s at at that point…. I hope that eventually we can communicate again, but things didn’t necessarily end on a high note.”
It certainly seems like a different tone than guitarist Nick Hipa seemed to take with the situation, although it's hard to discern tone from just reading text, in Hipa's case. Mancino also made mention of something fans likely overlook, and that's just how many people were affected by Lambesis' poor decisions:
“We didn’t want to make anything more difficult for him or for the band itself… but despite our own feelings he still has to deal with it and we still got the swift kick to the nuts to the As I Lay Dying camp and all of our fans. There [were] a lot of tours that were happening… literally when I got the call from our manager… I think we had just flown home from Shanghai, and I was at the bank putting the deposit in for the merch order because we were about to go on tour with Killswitch [Engage]… [And] it’s not just us, there’s a very long list of effects trickling up, tricking down. It [affected] all the promoters, all the people that we work with, all the agents, the record label, all of our fans… so there was a very wide spread effect.”
You can listen to the entire interview here. Wovenwar's Honor Is Dead can be ordered here for as low as $7.99.
