Interview: The Sword
by Chris Pacifico
Austin quartet the Sword look and play like a pack of shaggy misfits that grew up revolving their lives around Dungeons and Dragons and were frequently robbed of their milk money while being stuffed in lockers. This only motivated them to form a band with a Texas sized sound that obliterates everything in sight like a coked up bull in a china shop. Their tight knit instrumental synergy is fitted with a prog-knitted glove and a doom metal shell and a molten and smoldering core led by the deep cataclysmic vocals of singer/guitarist J.D. Cronise. The bass tremors of Bryan Ritchie rain down the brimstone riffs along with guitarist Kyle Shutt and the DEFCON 1 drums of Trevitt Wingo (name kind of sounds like a Welsh porn star) could shift tectonic plates deep below the earth’s surface.
Their debut “Age of Winters” tantalizes the senses similar to that of having a spell cast by a rouge wizard or being completely decimated by a hideous and ghoulish creature spawned from Saruman in the Lord of the Rings. While their lyrical stimulus may stem from literary fantasy and sci fi worlds of goblins and monsters, good and evil, etc, The Sword has had the thinking mans metal pin tailed on them quite a few times, but make no mistake, they also can kick out a brand of burly rock for those that like to head bang with their balls and beer bellies hanging out while sporting a wife beater and throwing up the horns.
Does it bother you that the people are always labeling you as just doom metal. That’s really only the surface of your sound.
Kyle Shutt: Whatever…
Bryan Ritchie: Stoner rock or hipster metal is just fine by me.
Kyle Shutt: We just play what we play.
“Age of Winters” contains hints reminiscent of earlier bands like Kyuss, Fu Manchu, and sometimes even earlier ones like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.
KS: The way I see it is that simply if you like good shit then you don’t want to make bad shit.
BR: Yeah, we’re mostly versed in the good shit.
There is a lot of vivid and mythical subject matter in your songs. Would you say that “Age of Winters” is a concept album or are these all just themes kind of intertwined within it?
JD: I would say the latter. It’s not really a concept album. Ideas, like what the winters represent, is also like an apocalyptic metaphor. Literature is an inspiration too, stuff like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft.
Does having a certain theme laid out prior to the recording process help to become more creative when it comes to penning the lyrics?
JD: Yeah. I mean it helps to have some kind of core idea to work around and build things off of rather than just doing random stuff.
KS: If you’ve got no core than it seems like you’re just wailing with no direction.
Klye, I saw on MTV’s You Hear It First segment where you said that metal was “too produced”. Could you touch base on that?
KS: It’s when you see a band live whose record you’ve heard, and then when their on stage, it sounds nothing like the record because of all the studio trickery. Our record is just our amps and us.
BR: We can probably play the songs better now than we played them on the record.
2006 Age of Winters (Kemado)
