CD Review: The Sword -- 'Warp Riders'

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Ask anyone to write a song called "The Chronomancer I: Hubris" and you probably won't be surprised by the results. Wraparound dragon shirts, mutton chops, Trapper Keepers full of awesomely implausible middle-earth weaponry -- you get the idea.

Austin's The Sword is all that and a dime sack, both on the lithely lumbering metal swagger of the aforementioned song and on the rest of their third record, Warp Riders, out today on Kemado. It is a restless, unrelenting barrage of crunching, crushing sound, held together only by momentum and a ridiculously taut rhythm section. There's maybe some kind of narrative going on too -- see "The Chronomancer II: Nemesis," in case you were worried about The Sword's rhetorical follow-through -- but neither of us is high enough to map it out right now. (That's what the comments section is for! Have at it, Frisco.)

Listening to a Sword album straight through is no small commitment, and Warp Riders no exception: it's equal parts dynamic roller coaster and spaceout sesh, where each guitar lick is a mystical quest and that rock you're walking on is actually a space alligator, etc. The mythology is half-baked (listen to lead single "Tres Brujas," one of the album's worst cuts, to learn about "the properties of certain herbs growing wild all across this land") and so are the melodies, but the interlocking stomp and groove of the low end is as sick (in the So-Cal sense of the word) as ever.

If The Sword have evolved at all since their debut, 2005's Age of Winters, it's in that the riffs got a little raunchier and the weed a little headier: compared to the density of ideas and changeups here, the linearity of Winters sounds downright austere. Not even the late-album couplet of the title track and "Night City" -- which could have been latter-day Def Leppard singles with the rhythm guitarist and drummer on steroids -- are content to rock out without dipping into a few experimental piecelets. What's with that Gregorian death chant at the end of "Chronomancer II"? The hint of organ in "Lawless Lands"? The sorry-you-died-but-put-in-another-quarter-to-battle-more-minotaurs outro at the end of "(The Night the Sky Cried) Tears of Fire"? Just what kind of stoner metal is this?

Let's go with "exemplary."

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