The pleasures of the metalhead are elemental. The perceptible thickening of gravity around certain sounds and images, the inward bending of light along a downtuned E-string . . . Real heaviness assents to the conditions of existence, to the weight of being alive, and you can never get enough of it. So swab your ears and shake out your mane, because Austin’s the Sword — currently one of the deeper satisfactions in the metal kingdom — are on their way. Age of Winters (Kemado), the Sword’s debut, is a ritualized invocation of powers, from its ice-and-fire Ragnarök imagery to the Sabbath-via-Sleep swagger of the riffs. The lazy or deadline-pressed have dubbed it “retro,” but there really is no retro in heavy metal — how could there be when the music is anti-modernist to the tips of its dinosaur toes? There is only the ritual, the thing done right; and the Sword, well, they do it right.
Speaking by cellphone from the inevitable moving vehicle (the band’s van — containing four musicians and one merch guy — is 45 miles outside Rawlins, Wyoming, and its inmates are crouched around an iPod watching Chappelle’s Show), vocalist/guitarist/lyricist JD Cronise admits to having formed the Sword in his mind before there was ever a band. “I guess you could say it’s my brainchild, yeah.” In 2003, Cronise, who already had most of the songs on Age of Winters written, recruited fellow guitarist Kyle Shutt and immaculately named drummer Trivett Wingo. Bassist Bryan Richie was the last to join: “I saw the Sword play as a three-piece, and JD asked from the stage if anybody wanted to play bass with the band, and I was into that. It was, you know, let’s just see where this goes. And it’s gone very well. We’ve all been playing music for a long time, and it’s all led to this band.”
Swiftly signed to Kemado, the Sword went out on the road last year opening for . . . And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (whose Conrad Keely is responsible for the Roger Dean–style cover art of Age of Winters). They’ve been out on their own headlining tour (which hits the Middle East upstairs this Monday) for the past month with Early Man, accumulating all kinds of buzz, including a clip on MTV’s “You Hear It First.” There appears to be a market opening up for what has so long toiled in the shadows as “stoner rock,” as well as a simmering backlash in the metal community against hipster latecomers.
Richie is skeptical of the attention. “I try not to take it to heart too much, because you don’t want to end up believing that you’re doing something beyond what you’re actually doing. I don’t know — I mean, we played a show in Salt Lake City last night to about 25 people. Tempe, Arizona, was probably less than 15. Those 15 people were definitely stoked, but it just shows you — buzz isn’t really worth much. It’s nice and all that, but it’s still everyone’s decision to actually come out to the show. It’s not like hundreds of people get crane-lifted in by MTV.”
