Album Reviews
The Sword: Gods of the Earth
The Sword
Gods of the Earth
<Kemado>
(Flaunt Magazine)
The landscape is arid, harsh, and unforgiving. The earth is cracked
and laid waste, a foreboding storm lurks behind the craggy mountians.
Then from between the ruined columns of some long abandoned shrine
emerges an oversized skeleton hand brandishing an gargantuan sword,
which pierces the sky as a lizard tongue of lightning strikes its
smooth steel. Although you can seldom judge a book by its cover, the
value of heavy metal albums can solely be judged by the contents of
their cover, and for Austin-based quartet The Sword, their latest
album Gods of the Earth will not disappoint.
Like the scene unfolding on their album cover, the sludgy, fuzzed-out
anthems of The Sword find their roots in the fantasy heavy metal
heyday of the 70’s. The tumbling chugs of crunchy guitar on the
opening track, “The Sundering,” coalesce with the rolling rhythm
section as they catch up to J.D. Cronise’s cocksure wrangling of the
herd. Metal connoisseurs may categorize The Sword as part doom metal,
with a delightful smattering of thrash, and topped off lyrically with
a pinch of Nordic mythos from Norweigan black metal. Rolling faster
than an out-of-control 12-sided die, “Fire Lances of the Ancient
Hyperzephrians” brings together J. D. Cronise’s distant vocals with
the brutality of harmonized guitar lines that crescendo into dueling
solos, all right on cue. For this brand of stoner rock, the sound is
enjoyably familiar as The Sword amalgamates the Sabbath-soaked
headbangers forged by a thousand bands before them, not as mere
imitation but more as devil horn-raising, joint smoking variations on
a theme.
-Drew Tewksbury
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