FEATURE
SPACED-OUT
TEXAS BOOGIE METAL
After two albums walking the line between heavy rock and
metal, J.D. Cronise and Kyle Shutt of the Sword unabashedly
indulge their taste for riffs and grooves with Warp Riders.
BY CHARLES SAUFLEY
The Sword (left to right): Drummer Trivett Wingo, guitarists Kyle Shutt, vocalist/guitarist J.D. Cronise with a doubleneck B.C. Rich, and bassist Bryan Richie.
One of rock’s great traditions—and paradox-es—is the band that revisits its roots in order
to evolve. That isn’t to say the Sword have
become Dylan holing up in Woodstock to
make John Wesley Harding. But Warp Riders,
the third album by these heavy merchants
from Austin, Texas, finds the Sword indulging
a subtle, but distinctly Texas-flavored sense
of groove and swing. This deep-seeded part
of the band’s DNA is helping guitarists J.D.
Cronise and Kyle Shutt break even further
away from metal convention and carve out a
unique domain among modern heavy rockers.
The Sword were never easily lumped in with the
modern metal pack. In the seven years since
the band came together, they’ve become one
of the standard bearers for a stylistically diverse
and loosely affiliated society of metal-influenced
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bands. Along with Witch, High on Fire, and
Priestess, the Sword eschews many of metal’s
more aggro, cliché, and consciously flash elements and instead look to Black Sabbath’s chugging riffery and Grand Funk’s and Thin Lizzy’s
backbeat-driven grooves—as well as the more
melodically raging sounds of the New Wave of
British Heavy Metal—to create a more soulful
metal/heavy-rock hybrid.
Warp Riders is a hard-hitting refinement of
that heady brew. Wrapped around a sci-fi tale
(in part about a planet with one hemisphere
locked in perpetual darkness), the album also
links the Sword to a narrative tradition that
runs from the Who’s Tommy to Rush’s 2112
and even Hüsker Dü’s pop-hardcore classic,
Zen Arcade. Warp Riders doesn’t disregard
the band’s metal roots entirely—not by a long
shot. But check out the hooks that propel
“Tres Brujas” (Three Witches)—not to men-
tion the nod to Texas’ favorite heavy boogie
kings in the song’s title—and it’s pretty clear
that the Sword may have been thinking as
much about tumbleweeds and greasy ribs as
whiplash thrashing and the black magic and
mystic herb invoked in the lyrics.
And so it goes over the course of Warp
Riders. Space trucking, vocal-based songs
like the title track and “Night City” give way
to full-throttle instrumentals like “Astraea’s
Dream,” replete with 64th-note runs and
pick-squealing savagery, before settling
back into thunderous grooves propelled by
Cronise and Shutt’s muscle-car riffery and the
thumping bass and drums of Bryan Richie and
Trivett Wingo.
