Texan doom-thrashers The Sword are at the cutting edge (arf!) of heavy metal’s new direction. That direction is backwards, a return to the powerful sonic roots of the genre – the thundering drums, thick riffs and moody imagery that have always been the metal hallmarks.
In the middle of their first headlining tour of the UK on the same week that their sophomore album Gods Of The Earth was released, The Sword rolled into Portsmouth to play a venue that had seen them support Clutch a little over a year beforehand. Yours truly was lurking with a biro and a dictaphone, and managed to snare a conversation with super-mellow guitarist Kyle Shutt before the show.
So, read on to find out about which authors especially inspire The Sword’s material, the economics of touring, and why the second album’s always trickier than the first …
TDP: So how’s it going in the world of The Sword?
Kyle Shutt: Yeah, good! We’re kinda wrapping up the tour, actually; tomorrow’s London, then it’s Colchester after that and then we’re going home for about two weeks.
TDP: It’s just the UK this time out?
Kyle Shutt: Yeah – but we’re doing some festivals later in the year, we’ll be back … that Bloodstock thing, I think that might happen, and then some other stuff like Norway, then we’ll try to make it down to Germany, too …
TDP: How has the tour coinciding with the release of Gods Of the Earth affected the vibe?
Kyle Shutt: Well, we took the summer of last year off to work on the record and then recorded it in the winter … and it came out this week in the States, and I think maybe here too, it was supposed to be earlier but it got pushed back, but now it’s out and the whole snowball’s about to start rolling again – we’ve got a whole year’s worth of tour already booked!
TDP: Last time I saw The Sword play here you were supporting Clutch …
Kyle Shutt: Yeah, that was fun! [grins] It’s kinda funny coming back to some of the same venues, because we knew we weren’t gonna sell them out, y’know. But it’s really fun to see all the people who remembered us from that tour come out to see us again.
TDP: How is it different for you being the headline act this time around?
Kyle Shutt: Well, it’s a little more low-key! Y’know, Clutch have been around for like twenty years, they’ve a huge fan base that you can’t just write off. But this is the first time we’ve ever tried headlining in the UK, and it’s gone well so far. Glasgow was a blast, last Saturday – I think they just really like it up there! But everywhere’s been really cool, I can’t think of anything bad to say.
Also, this is the first time we’ve been on a bus … well, we’ve been on a bus before, but this is the first time we’ve enjoyed it!
TDP: How do UK audiences differ from American audiences?
Kyle Shutt: Well, the American audiences have had more time to soak it all in; we’ve toured America as The Sword maybe ten or twelve times by this point – and that’s not even a lot compared to some people, y’know – so I think people here are a bit more low-key because they don’t know what to expect so much. But hopefully we can keep on making records, keep on coming back, and more and more people will show up each time!
TDP: How did the recording of Gods Of The Earth go?
Kyle Shutt: Well, we wanted to do it along the same lines as we did with the first one, which we recorded in Bryan [Richie - bass player]’s house over the course of a couple of weeks, then spent another handful of weeks mixing it, so it was really low-pressure and we kinda wanted to keep it like that … but it didn’t really end up working out that way!
We started off at Bryan’s house, but the label weren’t happy with various parts, with some of the sounds we were getting, so we ended up hiring a little studio in Austin. It ended up working out really well – we did almost all the drum tracks there, and after we had those done we took it all back to Bryan’s house and did a lot of the guitars and vocals and stuff.
Unfortunately we had booked a tour at the beginning of December [2007] because we thought we’d have had the record done by then … and for a few days before the tour we were in the studio mixing it with our heads in our hands saying “oh God, this isn’t going to work!”
So we toured for three weeks and came back, went into that same studio and finished it up. Looking back on it I kinda wish we’d had a little more time, but hey – can’t do anything about it now!
TDP: How close is it to the blueprint you had in mind when you started?
Kyle Shutt: Oh, very close – it’s just a matter of playing the songs enough live that you get bored with the way you’ve already played them, and then changing them up a bit. Each song kinda evolves past the way you recorded it, and that’s kinda frustrating.
TDP: So you played the new songs out live before recording Gods Of the Earth?
Kyle Shutt: A little, yeah, but not as much as we should have. I really wish we had toured for a good six months on the stuff. Y’know how everyone always says you have six years to write your first album and six months to write your second? That’s just the way it goes, I guess – we’re in it for the long haul now!
TDP: Is the long haul a good prospect – do you like being on the road?
Kyle Shutt: I do, yeah. It’s a great way to save money – if you just live off the daily allowance you get then you’re not really spending any money, and then you get home and usually have enough to pay your rent and stuff, so that works out well. But I just love waking up in a different place every day!
Sure, it gets tiring after you’ve done it every day for four weeks at a time, but I’m kinda sad it’s almost over. The three of us – The Sword, Saviours and Black Cobra – we’re all sharing a bus, and we’re all friends from back home, we’ve all toured together before, so it’s just like a little camp going on. [laughs]
TDP: Coming from Austin, the whole Southern metal sound is very much in what you do, but you’ve got this whole HP Lovecraft old-school horror aesthetic in your material too – how did that come about?
Kyle Shutt: Yeah – well, we’re all pretty literate, I guess. JD [Cronise - vox/guitar] is the main lyric writer and he takes a lot of influence from literature, but we’re all fairly well-read. We love the imagery, y’know, that writers like Robert E Howard and George R R Martin can conjure up. JD’s read a lot more of it than I have – I read A Game Of Thrones a couple of years back and really got the concepts [Martin] was going with.
I dunno – I don’t like it when bands are to literal in their approach about what they’re trying to convey sometimes, y’know? JD can really mask what he’s trying to say behind some powerful imagery, so he conveys some things that would make people think very differently … it’s whatever you want to take away from it, I guess.
TDP: Would it be fair to say there’s a certain sense of fun behind The Sword as well?
Kyle Shutt: Not really! People think that, but we’re goddamn serious about the music we write. There’s no real irony, we’re not a bunch of jean-jacket wearing poseurs trying to act like it’s 1985 or anything! We’re just trying to play the riffs we hear in our heads.
TDP: So what was the musical moment that made you think “hey – I want to do that”?
Kyle Shutt: We all have a different story about that! With our drummer, it had a lot to do with Led Zeppelin. Back when it was still cassettes, he had one of those things that held ten cassettes, and all ten were Led Zeppelin!
But Melvins really did it for me. That song “Hag Me” on Houdini, I remember hearing that when I was about eighteen or nineteen and just sitting back and letting the whole thing soak in, thinking “damn, I need to make something this heavy”. That was my first time experimenting with downtuned stuff, after listening to Melvins – we tune down to C natural now, I just love the way a guitar sounds when it’s tuned down that low!
When I was a kid growing up in Texas I was listening to a lot of stuff like Pantera and Slayer … I grew up in West Texas and there’s not a lot happening out there music-wise, so when I moved to Austin it opened my eyes to a lot of the different DIY hardcore stuff, like Karp.
TDP: What would you say is your biggest limitation as a band?
Kyle Shutt: We don’t really have any limitations … I mean, we’ve always kinda made up our own rules, y’know, we pretty much do what we want musically, and we all trust each other musically as well. Like every so often, if we’re at practice and one of us has a riff and it sounds a little funny at first, we’ll just jam on it until we all find the right groove around it. I don’t feel I have any limitations at all – it’s all very unanimous. It’s not so much democratic, but we all like to make sure we’re all on the same page at the same time.
TDP: Where do you think you’d be now if the band hadn’t taken off?
Kyle Shutt: I was the production manager of a photocopy centre, and I’d probably still be there making photocopies, to be honest! That’s why I’m so grateful for all this, y’know – this is my job now, and we get to just ride around and play our guitars as loud as we want. That’s pretty nice!
TDP: You’re obviously looking at The Sword as a career, and rightly so. What do you think about the record industry upsets going on at the moment over digital content and everything – on a personal level, what do you feel are the prospects for a long-term career as a musician?
Kyle Shutt: The touring is really where bands are still able to thrive – and a lot of record labels are getting wise to that and are trying to get in on a band’s merchandising deals and tour company. And in a perfect world a record company would have nothing to do with a band’s touring business, and that’s the kind of deal we have right now, for which we’re very grateful.
A lot of bands let their label run their merch too, and that’s that much more money they’re taking off the top, y’know. A lot of young bands especially are going to have to watch out because record labels don’t know what to do … they missed out on the internet, basically, they were trying to shut down Napster and shit.
I mean, people are always going to find a new way to download music, but back then everybody was getting it from this one place, and the record companies really tried to stop it instead of embracing it and so it spread out all over the place across hundreds of different sites. They really shot themselves in the foot, and as far as I’m concerned they can dig themselves out of it!
TDP: So how does it work with the label that The Sword are signed to?
Kyle Shutt: Well, they’re called Kemado, they’re based in New York. It’s a really good deal, they get the record all pressed, set up and ready for us, and any time we do a video or something they’ll help us out with that, set us up with directors and everything, all the works – they did a really great job of promoting the album.
But they don’t ever ask to take any of our merchandise money or anything like that, they’re a really artist-friendly label. If something’s going to be really good for your band to do but you can’t afford it, they’ll usually help you out, get you some plane tickets to get you somewhere to play a show or something. We’re really fortunate – they basically do things the way labels used to do!
It’s either a good thing or a bad thing, and only time will tell, but we’re really happy with them so far. Saviours [support band] too, they’re on Kemado as well, so this is kinda like a Kemado mini-tour!
TDP: OK, to close up, what were the last few albums you listened to on the bus?
Kyle Shutt: Y’know, we’ve mostly been watching movies on the bus, man! We haven’t really been blasting out any albums … last music we listened to would have been some early Bob Seger 45s, real early stuff before his first album even came out – that stuff’s really heavy, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard any, it doesn’t sound like his other stuff.
Then Faith No More, Angel Dust – they’re one of my favourite bands, too. And last night we were listening to Metallica – put on Ride The Lightning and just let it ride!
TDP: Ah, as long as it’s from before the Black Album, you’re fine! Thanks very much for your time, Kyle, and good luck with the tour and the album.
Kyle Shutt: No problems, man!
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Tags: doom, Kyle Shutt, metal, Southern metal, stoner, The Sword, thrash
