The Sword - "Gods of the Earth"

The Sword - To Take the Black (Kemado 2008)

The Sword - Gods of the Earth / Kemado

Dead Meadow's new album Old Growth came out recently, and maybe you'll see Michael's review for it here soon (Update: Sure enough, here you are). If not, here is what we both agree on without giving away some of the zingers of his write-up: It lacks a certain psychedelic flourish that made the band such a big deal for Matador in the first place. The epic, larger-than-your-living room element of expansive exploration that preceded their move to Lost Angeles was why we loved them. Now, with three-minute stoner jams, we have an oxymoron.

Another band has taken that same approach with their second album, but with the opposite effect: By tightening up their sound on Gods of the Earth, Austin, TX natives The Sword are now even more menacing than on Age of Winters. Or on their earliest EP, which I copped during a show opening for ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and The Octopus Project in early '05. What a brilliant tour. Can you imagine these guys opening for The Octopus Project now?

Thanks to some beefy production and a lethal dosage of distortion, I sure as hell can't. "The Sundering" starts out setting the mood with a mid-tempo rocker and thundering drums, but the band has cleverly opted for starting with an instrumental to maximize the anticipation. This subtle choice in tracking inadvertently gives the band exactly what Dead Meadow lacks, even with those short song lengths: cinema. It's no secret this band was built for the big time because, after all, look at that album art. Look at the song titles (The first single is "Fire Lances the Ancient Hyperzephyrians," an inspired choice). Look at the quotation this album was christened for:

"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men.... At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!" - Barzai the Wise

Apparently JD Cronise and HP Lovecraft have met somewhere during the course of "The Other Gods." These guys have always been about fighting dragons and using their otherworldly superpowers to demolish demons and all that, but here they've got some inspired riffing to go along with it. It's heavy as any underworld you can imagine, and pretty much every leaf from the Black Sabbath handbook has been ripped out and memorized. But come on, you could do a lot worse than covering "Under the Boughs" (which they did for a Kemado compilation called Invaders and which reappears here). Is it that The Sword are just that blatant in ripping Black Sabbath off? Or are they now just that good?

The former might've been true before. When I first heard Age of Winters, I was pleased that it was such a step up from their demo. But listening to this, it is easy to hear a band that's moving forward to find their own feet. There are dissonant elements and faster tempos that did not make Age of Winters as interesting to listen to. They've got tasteful solos ("The Black River" comes to mind), but never does guitar wankery trump sheer aural fury. The power behind this record is obvious. Alongside that other amazing rock record by another Black band, The Sword are demonstrating that conventional rock formulæ can be as invigorating as ever when done with the imagination that's required to keep up with someone like HP Lovecraft.