Needless to say, heavy music has seen a wide rash of changes to it's old guard over the last decade or so. Crusty, bearded grumpsters have become the norm, and gone are the days where nu-metal appeared ad nauseam on at least a handful of high profile hessian zines and sites' end of the year lists. Mastodon have become the poster children (or rednecks, depending on the way you look at it) for the metal genre as a whole whether you're privy to it or otherwise, and the style that the Mastodudes and their many compatriots in the progressive-sludge-post-core sub-genre (seriously, fuck modern categorization) has quickly become the go-to approach for younger metal musicians with quirky ideologies, prodigious musicality and talent to garner mass amounts of critical acclaim.
Enter Austin based retrograde D&D nerds The Sword. Since bell-bottom wearing frontman JD Cronise and The Sword found themselves on the heavy music map unexpectedly following the inclusion of their single "Freya" off of their debut album Age of Winters on the first installment of Guitar Hero, their brand of heavy, down driven riffage and smooth, melodious guitar work has been carefully cultivated and tweaked, resulting in this year's release Warp Riders. The biggest knock on The Sword heading into their junior effort was a lack of dynamism and an over reliance on a retro sound that closely mimicked past riff heavy greats like Sabbath and early Zeppelin. Simply giving Warp Riders a quick listen proves that those criticisms were taken to heart by Cronise and his cronies (come on, too easy), put in their collective pipe, and chiefed quite awhile back.
