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!

Saviours
Accelerated Living
Kemado

In my world, spelling counts. It’s all we’ve got. It separates us from the DUMB, and say what you want, but we’re one or two missed apostrophes away from the entire system collapsing on top of us. Maybe it’s pseudo-Babel paranoia, but we’re losing touch and buying into some sort of illiterate digital language legacy. Household cats the world over are laughing at us, biding their sweet tabby time. Pretty soon Fluffy will be calling the shots because we’ve left our capacity for the slightest semblance of intelligence in a puddle of drool on our keyboard. So it’s with devilish enthusiasm that I salute Saviours for the mightiest of unnoticed moves: the ‘u’.

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