Apocryphon

If I remember correctly, The Sword were among the first bands to get the dreaded “hipster metal” tag lobbed at them when they came seemingly out of nowhere back in 2006 with Age of Winters. I personally didn’t understand it; since when has ’70′s Sabbath flavored riff rock ever been considered “hip?” Do hipsters really listen to/like this stuff? The town I live in has a pretty sizeable hipster contingent, which is quite surprising for being centered smack dab in the asshole of the Midwest, but I have never once seen any of them at a metal or rock show, they’re too busy drinking coffee and listening to Bon Iver or some shit. Perhaps it had something to do with the way the band looked; Satan forbid someone make this music without sporting a navel-grazing billy goat beard and a denim vest that smells like a thirty-year-old beer fart. In reality, it was probably a combination of the hype surrounding the band and a pervasive media presence. Age of Winters was a competent if flawed album, but The Sword would continue to uh, sharpen their approach with 2008′s excellent Gods of the Earth, an album that (at least to these ears) was both heavier and catchier than what had come before. I somehow missed the quartet’s third album, the science-fiction concept album Warp Riders, but when Apocryphon was released earlier this year, I was ready to check back in with the band so many metalheads seemingly love to hate.

Listening to Apocryphon, it seems somehow fitting that I (unintentionally) skipped Warp Riders, because this album sounds like the direct sequel to Gods of the Earth. It’s got a similar stoned-out vibe, similar big-ass riffs, but the production is better and the songwriting is more refined, sort of like how Evil Dead and Evil Dead II are essentially the same movie, but Evil Dead II takes everything that made the original great and improves upon it tenfold. Sometimes it isn’t necessary to fuck with the formula when you know you’ve got a good thing going, just modify and tweek it ever-so-slightly and let the fucking heads bang on.

The thing I’ve always liked about The Sword is that every song sounds like they’re trying to write that elusive big hard rock/heavy metal anthem; there’s a sort of swaggering, down ‘n’ dirty majesty to their music that sets them apart from many bands caught up in the retro tidal wave, mixed with a hint of proto-doom, like if Fandango-era ZZ Top smoked the stickiest of the icky with Paranoid-era Tony Iommi and unleashed an epic riffing sesh. I don’t know about you, but I for one am down like a mole with the almost forty-five minutes of “Heard it on the X” meets “Hand of Doom”-style jams on display here. Indeed, Apocryphon sees The Sword perfecting that aforementioned formula, whether it be with the slow trudge of “The Hidden Masters” and “Seven Sisters,” riff-tastic opening one-two punch of “Veil of Isis” and “Cloak of Feathers” or the ultra-catchy “Eyes of the Stormwitch;” hipsters wouldn’t know what to do with such a prodigious fistful of rock.

Apocryphon‘s production is a deftly executed balance of punchiness, fuzziness and heft. Credit must be given to J. Robbins, who is more renowned for producing hardcore/post-hardore/emo albums, for perfectly capturing The Sword’s polished gnarliness. It’s a very bright sounding album, but don’t equate brightness with a lack of heaviness. Apocryphon is plenty heavy, although the real emphasis here is on the righteous riffage. The Sword aren’t looking to crush, suffocate or overwhelm with their music; they’re a band that just wants to rock out and take your candy ass along for the ride. There’s a hell of a lot to be said for that kind of simplicity and purity of purpose.

If you’re still convinced that The Sword are flagrant hipsters, Apocryphon isn’t going to do a damn thing to change your mind. Those with more open minds and an appreciation for early heavy metal, stoner rock and good ol’ fashioned hard rock on the other hand will find much to enjoy here; a startlingly memorable slab of retro radness done good and proper. If digging Apocryphon makes me a false, then I don’t want to be true.

Originally written for That's How Kids Die.com

Something I’ll never quite be able to understand is the fascination with the throwback riff metal sound. Although I’m as much a fan of Black Sabbath as the next guy, the idea of taking the sound of the 1970’s and reviving it forty years after the fact has rarely appealed to my taste as a listener. Mind you, as this sort of music goes, The Sword have long been at the top of their class. With each album leading up to “Apocryphon”, they have managed to up their game somehow, whether it was through developments in their style or improvements in the way they brought their retro-rock to the recorded medium. On “Apocryphon”, this experience and momentum has certainly paid off, and as a result, it’s one of the tightest-sounding records you’re bound to hear this year. Sadly, The Sword fail to back up their expert craft with the sort of innovation I’d hope for from a band with such a bold reputation. For the listener looking for some swell riffs and rich guitar tones, “Apocryphon” is ideal. Regardless, I’m left feeling a little underwhelmed.

First, I’d like to say that The Sword are masters when it comes to the execution and presentation of their product. In both the production- which is organic and expertly mixed- and the gorgeously psychedelic artwork, The Sword have a perfect frame to present their tunes through. Although the studio has translated the gritty guitar distortion into something very clean-cut, there’s no shortage of heaviness in their riffs. The drums and bass are equally powerful, with Santiago Vela’s percussion coming across as especially impressive. Stylistically, I found myself almost instantly reminded of Black Sabbath, as if “Apocryphon” was picking up where the first three or four Sabbath albums left off. There’s tons of Iommi worship in these riffs, although the heaviness is offset by a moderately psychedelic atmosphere and extremely melodic set of clean vocals, both reminiscent of where Mastodon took their sound last year with “The Hunter”. Although the riffs tend to stick to the bluesy pentatonic realm of classic metal canon, there’s plenty of meaty energy behind each lick and power chord.

Of course, The Sword are not the only ones who have narrowed in on this particular way of doing things. Although it’s been executed with excellence, there’s little else about “Apocryphon” that helps it stand above the hordes of other stoner metal records out on the market. Although “Cloak of Feathers” and the closing title track each distinguish themselves for their strength of songwriting, the songs on “Apocryphon” tend to rehash the same increasingly tired tricks. Granted, there are a few curveballs thrown along the way- I definitely wasn’t expecting a synth intro to the closer!- but The Sword’s songwriting generally tends to play it safe, eschewing any sort of intent to grow beyond what they have done on albums past.

Although the album seems to trail off anti-climactically, therein lies one of The Sword’s most brilliant ideas on “Apocryphon”: it feels the structural intention of the album is to listen to it on cyclical repeat, rather than an ordinary ‘start-to-finish’ affair. With the band playing the album tracks in reverse live and certain lyrics (“The serpent eats its tail”) as clues, The Sword seem to have very subtly incorporated a conceptual element to the album. Of course, it may simply be e looking for an added layer of cohesiveness in an album that feels lacking something important. In spite of its killer production values and impressive musicianship, “Apocryphon” feels bland, and in need of something to break the blues riff-induced monotony. It makes for an enjoyable afternoon, but I think some innovation to the style could have made the album great.

Okay, one superficial thing I want to get out of the way really quickly: I adore The Sword's album covers. Seriously, they've gotten better and better since the debut. Age of Winters's stained glass affair was cool but nothing particularly special, Gods of the Earth was adorned with a really striking painting that instantly made me want to hear the album (plus I have an affinity for album covers unblemished with band logos or album titles), Warp Riders was just a damn awesome throwback to OG sci-fi (and for a very stupid personal connection, it really reminded me of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to read in grade school), and now with their fourth album, Apocryphon, it's just the essence of cool. Look at that, the colors pop, the figure in the middle stands prominent, the ruins beneath are drab and scattered like dusty old toys, it's just very striking and sticks in your mind after the very first time you see it.

And sadly, that's about the extent of the praise I can give to Apocryphon. The Sword made a huge splash with their first album, basically roaring from out of nowhere to make this huge mainstream presence with a style that is both incredibly easy to write and done to death, so they rightly earned a staunch number of non-fans right off the bat for their perceived posturing and media-friendliness. Personally, I found Age of Winters to be a flawed gem. The drumming style was intrusive and headache inducing, the lyrics were shallower than a petri dish, and the vocals sounded tired and lacking in passion, but the riffs where so memorable and fun and the songwriting was so devilishly catchy that I found it hard to hate the album despite the very valid complaints. Now, I haven't reviewed the albums since then because I was never able to find much else to say that I hadn't said already about Age of Winters. The Sword has been so focused on growing beards and trying to find different wordings of lyrics they'd already written that they forgot to write any new songs. Gods of the Earth was an incredibly dull album, with maybe one track I remember liking at all, and even with that I can't quite remember the name of it ("Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians" or something equally stupid), and Warp Riders, while at least being more energetic than its predecessor, still carried an overwhelmingly thick essence of deja vu and had very few standout tracks. Well the fact that I didn't skip over this newest album shows promise, right?

Wrong. This is the same problem that's been plaguing The Sword for six years now, they've done fuck all in the way of evolving since their inception. Their genre on MA is split as "stoner/doom metal (early), stoner/heavy metal (later)", which blows my mind because their albums are all practically indistinguishable from one another. It's a shame because I really did like that first album, but now essentially all the charm and charisma they had has been worn away with the overuse of ideas. These riffs are on their thirtieth run through the grinder, it's time to give it a rest already, fellas. Try something different, anything, I don't care. Make a trip hop song, write a high octane ode to your fetishistic love of caramel apples, a ballad about poodles, just... anything other than another midpaced Sleep/High on Fire song about space or mythic gods. It's so played out, we get it. The lyrics still haven't improved from the amateurish slapdash style exhibited early on in their career, so it's essentially the same flawed album for the fourth straight time.

What makes flawed things valuable is their rarity. Into the Unknown by Bad Religion is difficult to find and highly expensive because it's a strange album that is leagues away from what the otherwise consistent band has ever done. The Yellow Goat Head Bathory LPs? Every metal fan knows about those and the exorbitant prices collectors are willing to shell out on ebay for them. I'm sure there's some misprinted "Bonus Vagner" baseball card in some dusty old bat's attic that Wayne Gretzky would be willing to pay another twelve quadrillion dollars for. The thing is, if ol' Honus was misprinted on every single card produced that year, it wouldn't be a rare valuable, it'd be a defective batch of cards. This fourth straight album full of the exact same ideas executed in the exact same way with the exact same shortcomings shows that The Sword is a defective band. They lack the creativity and exuberance to write anything ear catching or worthwhile nowadays. The shit drumming and agonizingly bad lyrics were more of just a funny quirk on Age of Winters, whereas since then they've been cemented as integral to the band's identity. This is distracting and the one huge problem with the band overall, not just little nitpicky shit like a boring song here and there. Their very existence has been rendered redundant by none other than the band themselves.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are indeed some things I enjoy about Apocryphon. I think the closing title track is great. Nearly every vibrant riff on the album (that the band used to sneeze out three times per track) seems to have been crammed into these five minutes, and I know it's weird but I love the silly little beep boop noises in the intro and bridge. "Dying Earth" is probably the most energetic song on the album, with the highest tempo and most aggressive riffing, and it stands out because despite what the band aims for, I've always thought their fastest stuff was among their best ("Iron Swan" is doubtlessly the best track on the debut, for example). And lastly "Hawks & Serpents" goes for more of a rock n' roll feel and benefits greatly from it. Not only because it's something different from the low/mid tempo vaguely stonerish riffs we're normally treated to, but because the band is surprisingly pretty good at writing more rock oriented numbers. It rides on no more than one main riff for most of the duration but it works very well and never gets grating.

But those are merely three tracks out of the ten on display, and the remaining seven are utterly forgettable in every way. Those lyrics I complained about being amateurish and lazy are paradoxically inconsequential on this album, as I thought "Arcane Montane" and "The Hidden Masters" were instrumental the first two times I listened to this album. They just blur by, nothing hooks you, nothing catches your attention, nothing fights for the spotlight, it's just one drab, grey mass of music buzzing past your ears. Those two songs, by the way, are placed next to each other in the tracklist. What's that tell you when two straight songs pass through my ears, barely measuring so much as an idle twitch from my... uhh, music receptors in my brain or whatever. I can't even point out any particularly bad moments on the album, all but the three tracks highlighted in the previous paragraph are completely lifeless and dull mid tempo stoner metal songs, that's all there really is to it.

It's honestly so much harder to review a mediocre or boring album than a truly bad one, and this is just so pointless of a record that I can barely justify ranting what I have. I don't carry any vitriol for Apocryphon, I really don't, but I guarantee you that after I hit the "publish" button, I'll never be listening to it again. Fans who have remained fans across the previous three records will adore this, as it's essentially Live Free or Age the Winterser with a Vengeance. For non-fans, this won't sway you at all. I can give the album at least a small bit of credit because there are a full three songs I like this time around, which is about as many from the previous two combined. I really think The Sword needs to either drastically change up the writing process or take a break and work on side projects or something. They need fresh ideas, or maybe an entirely new perspective. The hipstery neckbearded drummer left, true, but clearly he wasn't the driving force behind the writing, because the replacement is nearly unidentifiable. I wouldn't have noticed there was a new drummer had I not looked up their lineup to see if it was the same four chumps since the beginning. That's a testament to what this album is, just another faceless replacement while they fund their prostitute habit.


Originally written for http://lairofthebastard.blogspot.com/