The Art of War

“The King’s Brass Knuckles” by Hundred Years War:

Chris Wagner stands in a puddle with his hands crossed before him, crotch-level, like a soldier at ease. His bass guitar wags gently as he shuffles in the shallow pool of rainwater, no more than a quarter-inch deep — a quarter-inch too deep for electric instruments.

“Stay on the rug, and you won’t get electrocuted,” singer Jason Hall says. The dirty, tamped-down cut of fabric, its Arabic or Chinese pattern sullied by the rain and a thousand footsteps, doesn’t seem a likely nonconductor.

Drummer Mike Myers retrieves a case of Bud Light from a mossy-looking couch.

“You can have a warm beer,” Myers offers. “Or an icy pop.” He holds up a limp blue tube of liquid. Maybe not. He tosses it back in the cooler, which now holds only a few inches of water.

This unfinished basement cavern in midtown serves as the practice space for Hundred Years War, but it’s a cheery dungeon. Its damp ceiling is sparsely festooned with bulbous holiday lights. Most of them are blue. The walls are bare, save a campaign poster that reads “African-Americans for Kerry,” hinged on the corner of a large poster for the Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry.

Myers takes a seat behind his glittering drum set. He tightens the rods on his drums with a key.

“We’ve got a String and Return show coming up,” Myers says. “We’re gonna do our once-a-year.” He and Hundred Years War guitarist Auggie Wolber both play in the infrequently gigging String and Return, whose music — a pretty, sedate distillation of indie rock — is chasms apart from the bass-heavy stop-and-go pummel of Hundred Years War.

“Will Nirvana close the night?” Wagner asks, grinning. One or another of them complains of the heat, and Wagner, still shuffling in his private lake, ponders with faux cluelessness: “What could possibly explain this humidity?”

As the band begins the practice set with “The King’s Brass Knuckles,” Myers’ head begins to bob of its own accord. He looks like he’s having fun.

“You were kissin’ babies through that fill!” Hall yells between songs.

“We started with such little explanations,” explains Myers, who also plays in dreamy KC act In the Pines. “It’s 180 degrees from what we did before,” he adds, though he notes that Wolber has played “some heavier stuff.”

Hall and Wagner played in the Secret Club, whose sleepily brooding tunes also seem fathoms away from Hundred Years War’s sledgehammer sound. The band hasn’t forgotten that Flipper still rules, and its members recall all the great moments of the early ’90s: screams, riffs and blood. There are tinges, too, of the hoof-pound metal of High on Fire and the hardcore bogginess of Unsane. (The band shares a bill with Unsane Monday.)

On a lark, Hundred Years War decided to play Metal Wars, one of the spinoffs from local battle-of-the-bands impresario Jim Kilroy’s Club Wars. To the band’s surprise — and to the chagrin of the more surly and demonstrably “metal” among the competing acts — Hundred Years won its initial round. Hall remembers in particular a big, lank-haired, runner-up who was an especially sore loser. “This guy was a cool 6-foot-6, 250 pounds,” Myers says.

The band’s goal in entering the Metal Wars was to escape, temporarily, the scene that bred it. “It was a successful experiment,” Myers says.

The band agrees that Metal Wars provided some much-needed perspective, plus confirmation that the guys were doing more than puttering around. After all, a band whose members have a rich history of playing in nonmetal bands might be expected to harbor an inferiority complex when it comes to the harder stuff.

Myers, Wolber, Hall and Wagner met as a clutch of wishful metalheads, most of whom had found themselves — happily, mind you — in a roster of successful bands whose heaviest moments didn’t get much weightier than a fuzz pedal full of feathers. So they’ve used Hundred Years War to indulge their shadiest tastes.

The set compactly rehearsed, the band retires to Myers’ screened-in back porch. Outside, the rain doesn’t cease but instead falls so finely that it seems to meet the ground’s exhalations of steam halfway.

“The lyrics are the most metal part of it,” Myers says. “Blood, guts, cutting.”

Though they’re spun from some grim subbasement of Hall’s brain, the lyrics aren’t all succubi and scimitars. Demons are exorcised, grudges sourly remembered.

“Aside from me writing pretty much everyone’s part, we collaborate,” Hall says. He’s happy to offer a thematic rundown of the band’s set: “Attack of the Demon Cobra” is about ex-band members, and “Counting with Razorblades” is informed by torture, Hall says plainly.

“Such anger,” Wolber scolds.

“‘You’re Fucking Dead’ is about watching someone you really care about die,” Hall continues, unhampered. “And ‘Al Capone’ … well, I guess it’s really just about Al Capone.”

Myers nods. “What a guy,” he says. Personal venom aside, Hall penned one doom-heralding set of lyrics for “Ride Pale Horse Ride.”

“It’s about the apocalypse, you know, the darkness,” he says. The motif begs little elaboration.

For Myers, the sharply angled departure of Hundred Years War from the softer-focus, lovelorn tunes of In the Pines and the String in Return conjures memories of what could have been — and what thankfully wasn’t.

“I got asked to be in Audio Adrenaline in 1998,” he says. “Chose the right path there.”

Where would he be now had he joined the Christian pop band at age 18, he wonders aloud.

“You woulda been with DC Talk!” Hall says.

“Michael W. Smith tour, ’98,” Myers says dreamily.

“That guy is still rolling bank,” Hall marvels.

As a trade-off for lucre toothlessly earned, this gig seems pretty good to Myers. The future is indefinite, but he says he intends to “keep the dream alive.” More encounters, too, with the sort of druidic growlers that Hall refers to as “Cookie Monster singers” may be ahead for the War.

“Maybe we can just play battles of the bands,” Wagner says, inspired by the absurdity of the concept: the premier battle-of-the-bands band.

“We just wanted to do something really heavy and noncommittal, and we’d all professed our love for metal,” Myers says.

“But we’re not metal,” counters Wolber. Someone mentions math rock, and Wagner shrugs. “These songs write themselves,” he says. Hall scoffs and claims that his own muse-conjuring creative process involves cutting himself and beating his head against a wall.

The members seem baffled by their own success. And for now, they seem to be content with setting the proverbial bar blissfully low.

“The glory of our songs is that we know how to end them,” Wolber says.

Myers gets up to leave for a DJ set at Karma, and his bandmates head back downstairs to collect their gear, but not before Hall imagines a headline for this feature: “Functional Alcoholics Somehow Make It From Beginning to End.”