People have long accused The Sword of just ripping off Black Sabbath, and now I've heard people accusing them of ripping off Led Zeppelin with this album. I don't think either allegation is entirely fair - hearing them try to rip off Led Zeppelin would be more interesting than this. High Country is a more 'radio-friendly rock' album from The Sword, a band who I know for a fact are really nice guys, and I've always wished them well in their quest for more mainstream success. Alas, they haven't struck gold with this album.
Right away, you'll notice the gain has been dialed way back on those guitars, making the tone indeed more Jimmy Page than Tony Iommi. This is a well-produced album, certainly; everything sounds very nice. However, minus the stoner metal fuzz and more aggressive pacing of their early work, the album just feels lacking. The problem, I think, is that while the production style has changed quite a bit, the core of the music remains the same (full disclosure: I wrote 'bore' instead of 'core' the first time I wrote that sentence, so we know what we're dealing with here.) The band is still playing the same pentatonic riffs they've been playing since their first album, but on their fifth effort, they just feel a bit... tired. Regrettably, the band veers in to some synth-driven territory on this album, with the main offender, 'Seriously Mysterious', being just cringeworthy, from that title on down to the inappropriate use of drum samples (which also plagues a couple other tracks).
Vocals have never been The Sword's strong suit, and main man JD Cronise delivers the same bored Ozzy impression he has for five albums now. That's fine if you're doing stoner metal, but in the absence of anything more musically interesting (or at least in-your-face), one might expect him to step up his game a little. In fact, the most enjoyable tracks on this album happen to be the instrumentals: 'Unicorn Farm' and 'Suffer No Fools' are both rockin' little tunes that end way too quickly. Fortunately considering the album's 15-track length, all of the songs are mercifully short, with quite a few not even cracking three minutes. Kudos to a couple of tracks towards the end ('Ghost Eye' and 'Turned to Dust') for shaking things up melodically a little bit, steering things away from the pentatonic tedium. 'Turned to Dust' in particular feels like the intro to a much longer (and better) song, but it's marred by more unfortunate drum samples and ends before it really gets started.
This album feels like some good but undeveloped ideas mixed in with some standard Sword tunes, albeit modified to try and accommodate wusses who can't deal with a little (ok, a lot of) guitar distortion. The short length of all the tracks is particularly jarring, since the band has written some lengthy, multi-part songs in the past. Perhaps what the band is lacking is a bit more ambition; they seem to want to move in a different direction, but are afraid (or maybe don't know how) to write songs that aren't melodically similar to what they've done before. While to comparison to Zep is undeserved, maybe they should embrace it; the blues-rock moments that shine through at the very beginning and very end of the album did manage to grab my attention. I don't know what the deal is though, these are just my thoughts. I like this band, but I can't give this album a good score.
2 Unicorn farms out of 5
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