Strap on your armour and ready your weapons; it is time to do battle with the forces of evil, and The Sword’s second album Gods Of The Earth will be our call to arms.
Oh yes, make no mistake – The Sword’s much anticipated sophomore album is a tailor-made soundtrack to a night in front of World Of Warcraft, or round at a friend’s house with the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragons and an eighth of dodgy homegrown.
Gods Of The Earth is hair grown as long as your school rules will permit; Gods Of The Earth is sleeveless denim jackets with Sabbath patches; Gods Of The Earth is all the best and most endearing clichés of horror-fantasy heavy metal.
Hailing from Texas, the influence of the Southern metal sound is as inevitable as it is inescapable in The Sword’s music. But they’ve exchanged the tough-guy “don’t tread on me” aggression of their neighbours for glorious schlocky overstatement and an all-consuming worship of the RIFF.
Gods Of The Earth is named after a quote from pulp horror writer H P Lovecraft, and the song titles let you know exactly what you’re in for: “Fire Lances Of The Ancient Hyperzepheyrians” deserves some sort of award for its name alone, and the straining creepy invocations of frontman J D Cronise’s vocals brings the material to life like the paranoid ramblings of a Tolkien-fixated madman.
But The Sword’s music is no less accomplished and overblown than the titles and lyrics. The songs on Gods Of The Earth start from the basic template laid down by Tony Iommi back in the day, but update it slightly with a detour through the beefy chuggity-chug rhythms of old-school thrash and the harmonic pinches and squeals of the modern metal styles.
The thunderous drumming and epic guitar work take centre stage thanks to the uncomplicated production. Gods Of The Earth is recorded to sound loud and heavy, but nothing more; a minimum of obtrusive studio trickery creates the raw up-close-and-personal volume that the seventies metal originators made their own.
Let’s be plain: The Sword are doing nothing new. To make Gods Of The Earth sound original, you’d have to travel more than three decades back in time. But homage is a talent in its own right, and The Sword elevate the hoary old clichés of metal to the level of art simply by throwing everything they have into it.
Gods Of The Earth is, despite its dark tone and subject matter, a celebration; The Sword’s love of what they do shines through the entire album and puts them leagues ahead of the retro copyists. Great stuff – quite possibly the best straight-up metal album so far this year.
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Tags: doom, Gods Of The Earth, metal, stoner, The Sword
