The Sword
Warp Riders
Kemado

First ever concept album from Texan metal monsters The Sword, which, as you might guess from the cover, draws its cosmic inspiration from old bargain bin sci-fi novels and creased issues of Heavy Metal magazine. Warp Riders, then, is a conscious thematic shift for the band, which has set its lyrical sights this time on the great beyond, tackling planetary forces of good and evil instead of the more earthly doom and gloom of battle axes and black magic. The narrative, in brief, is about Ereth, an archer who has been banished from his tribe on the planet Acheron, which is stuck in a tidal lock, meaning that half of it is shrouded in darkness while the other half is burnt by the heat of three different suns. Got it? Good. Warp Riders is also a bit of a musical departure for The Sword as well, who have surround their space-world narrative with some freak-fried, 70s-infused boogie doom, and the whole thing kind of sounds like Witchcraft and Year Long Disaster gigging biker bars on Mars. Dig the thick, red rock n’ roll on “Tres Brujas,” “Lawless Lands,” “Night City,” and “(The Night the Sky Cried) Tears of Fire” for the best examples. But listen, the faithful needn’t worry because The Sword haven’t completely abandoned their head-banging aesthetics; they’ve just fused some asteroid-splitting riffs with their old pro stoner thrashing for a massively dope ride through the outermost limits. And it really is some awesome stuff.

Listen to “Night City” from Warp Riders!

The Ocean
Heliocentric
Pelagic Records/Metal Blade Records

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of The Ocean’s new album, Heliocentric, is that the once massive collective, which boasted in the ballpark of 40 musicians and vocalists over the years, seems to have been whittled down to a measly five members now (not including, of course, the people responsible for the orchestration). However, that wholesale personnel scaling has not diminished the German band’s sweeping, post-metal power one bit. Opting for a cleaner approach this time around, particularly in regards to the work of new vocalist Loïc Rossetti, the songs on Heliocentric are less aggressive than on previous albums, but deliver a sound so monumental in scope they contain a genuine, terrifying beauty underneath the darkness of the consuming riffs. Heavy on the orchestration, Heliocentric moves through its astronomical and philosophical concept at religion’s expense quite progressively, weighing the delicate balance of brute force and serene ambiance as though a slight tip of the scale could have catastrophic consequences. The best part is, Heliocentric‘s companion album, Anthropocentric, is due out in a few months, which means there’s more epic, elemental metal to come.

Listen to “Ptolemy Was Wrong” from Heliocentric!

In the first movie, you’ve got these six chicks, all of ‘em adrenaline junkies, who take a vacation in the Appalachian Mountains to go cave diving. Although it’s more like cave crawling, because these are unexplored caves without much room, see, and since the goal of these movies, as much as I can gather, is to make you squirm one way or another, they lean heavily on the claustrophobic button. So there they are, crawling through rocky cracks deep in the Earth’s belly, in these unmarked, unexplored caves (because that’s more of a thrill despite the fact that no one knows where you are) with dust, debris, and water falling all around them. They don’t really know where the hell they’re going, so they just keep making their way deeper and deeper. Then there’s a mini avalanche of some sort and their only way out has just been cut off. The rocks also fell on one of their equipment bags; the one with the rope, so that’s a major setback. Anyway, this shit goes on for about an hour, and will only really make you uncomfortable if you hate the dark and have a major fear of being trapped in a small space. Or buried alive. For everyone else it’s 60 minutes of watching six women crawl around in caves. But then, finally, the cave monsters show up.

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