The Sword @ The Black Cat 4/5/06
I will start this off with a disclaimer. My opinion is in the minority on the following subject. This isn’t uncommon, but people whose music taste i often share disagreed with me on this one, and i’m willing to chalk it up to me having bad taste in this instance, but not with out stating my rationale.
The Sword from Austin, TX stopped in Wednesday, and more or less filled the backstage at the Black Cat for a riff rock extravaganza. The four men (we’ll come back to that) had a riff for everyone, without all those messy lyrics (there were some, but very few and none that i could make out). There was even a riff for me. But there was only one, and that’s not gonna cut it.
They were not bad, but the best i can say is they were brutally competent. There was no soul, no anger, no meanness, no display of incredible skill, no display of emotion at all if you, like me, do not believe ‘rockin’ to be an emotion, and a complete lack of new ideas. They were definitely ‘rockin’ though, and most of the crowd, including my friends, seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I would have rather put on some Sepultura. Where i wasn’t able to come up for a musical comparison for SCAC the other day, I quickly tagged these guys somewhere between the skater/stoner rock of Fu Manchu and the riff change-ups that make me think of Sepultura in a hard rock setting. I mentally labeled them ‘Sepultura, if Sepultura was white and attending UT, possibly on scholarship.’
“They seem like such nice young boys” one of my friends commented, but that was part of the problem. If i am at a rock show, and i think i could kick the band’s ass, i at least want the music to tell me i’m wrong.
To me loud rock/metal has always had two schools. One school’s music says “I am going to kick your ass.” I would put Sepultura squarely into this category. The other (and to me equally important) school’s music says “I could kick your ass if i wanted to.” Several of Godflesh’s albums fit in this school. The Sword’s slow burn ‘if i wanted to’ school riffs were ok, but they got changed up too fast to ever become ominous. Nothing was ever fast/angry/mean enough for the ‘i am going to ’ school.
The Sword has the talent to be much better than they are, but they won’t earn my favor until they stake claim to a position on the ass-kicking spectrum. I don’t expect that to happen.