Squarepusher / Aphex Twin / Venetian snares - Live drums

Beans is a bit of a strange chap. No, strange is too strong a word. Perhaps individual is better, in the sense that he avoids styles of hip-hop with the trappings of glitz, glamour, and the hustle of some New York rap. Instead, being more of a modern day beat-poet, his work with Antipop Consortium bordered as much on inventiveness as it did near insanity. I still regret putting on Arrhythmia for some friends after a heavy night out: the ping-pong balls and abstract sounds really didn’t help some with the hangovers.

Somewhat terminally titled End It All, this is Beans’ fourth solo album, and also marks a break from the reunion of Antipop Consortium and their 2009 release Fluorescent Black. I had lost track of what both Beans and Antipop Consortium had been up to in recent years, and what drew me to this was the focus on guest producers such as Four Tet, Clark, and Tobacco. These collaborators create a wealth of different platforms to which Beans and his unmistakable vocal delivery can skip around, from the fizzing sounds of ‘Glass Coffins’, the aggressive overdriven beats of ‘Blue Movie’ to the mechanical and melodic ‘Mellow You Out’. Melody is sparsely investigated in an album that could be looked at as slightly intimidating or aggressive, especially on ‘Anvil Falling’ and the stripped down ‘Hardliner’.

This is perhaps due to End It All being a brief album. At around 33 minutes it can feel hurried and disjointed. On some tracks such as ‘Air Is Free’, Beans’ vocals sound detached from the music below him, and on others his rhymes to drift above or around the music. In this minor way it can feel off-putting, but then I would expect nothing less from the man who often strays from the norm, and it doesn’t detract from an album that although is decent enough, it is just crying out for a few more tracks.

[Originally published on TLOBF]

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This album will make or break The Sword. Warp Riders is the band’s third album, and in recent times they have slowly positioned themselves to be at the forefront of a change in the more the “traditional” side of metal. A few ago I was deafened by the band who were on tour with Saviours — another excellent riff based band. It was a co-headline tour and at that time I took The Sword’s place in the “retro-metal” hierarchy at face value, with both bands being on par with each other. However, the differences in exposure between the two bands is obvious. In the case of that track from Guitar Hero II, it has certainly helped them — with a myriad of young guitarists posting their versions of The Sword tracks on youtube (even for ‘Tres Brujas’) — but more so it was the first slot on the gigantic World Magnetic Metallica tour, and recently supporting the Dark Lord Ozzy Osbourne. It is these high profile support slots that have maintained the link with the fans across the globe.

This album is the Austin TX quadruplet’s first concept album, inspired by 70s and 80s sci-fi in both print and animated film, along with “old Heavy Metal magazines”. Previously, only a handful of tracks were directly inspired by works of fiction (‘The Frost-Giant’s Daughter’, ‘To Take the Black’, and ‘The Black River’ from 2008’s Gods of the Earth), but this album sees the band compose around an original story penned by guitarist/vocalist J.D Cronise. A primitive hunter named Ereth, banished from his tribe to the planet Echeron (a planet divided by darkness and light) discovers an ancient device (the Orb) once owned by a sorcerer of a bygone era — the Chronomancer. The scientist enlists Ereth in a quest to restore the planet’s balance and for him to escape a cataclysmic event by fleeing into the future. Along the way, Ereth encounters various obstacles including witches (‘Tres Brujas’), androids (‘Arrows in the Dark’), trippy plants, intergalactic armadas, and a crew of space pirates with a vessel known as The Sword. Cronise has recently said that there are semi-conscious attempts to compare the life in a touring band with the crew of a spaceship: “time doesn’t seem to pass at the same rate; you crawl into your sleep chamber in once place and wake up somewhere else far away.” At this point you could question the sanity of Cronise, but I am struggling to think of many bands who attempt to inject intense touring schedules into a concept album in this way.

Whereas Age of Winters was a rather one dimensional and Gods of the Earth a little patchy during the second half, Warp Riders is much more of a concentrated effort. It also marks a new direction from the band, taking in more traditional elements of 80s and 90s rock/metal within the songwriting, but also with the sound of the album. The tempos vary from thrashing Saviours to Thin Lizzy esque hard rock on ‘Lawless Lands’, and the band more importantly take a step back from the cognitive overload from the various layers of guitar. For the most the two guitarists of Cronise and Kyle Shutt concentrate on think powerchords (with a few huge open ones for good measure) and intricate licks. It will turn heads, but not because of a different take on retro-metal, but because The Sword, once regarded as a gateway band to doom metal have now released a solid hard rock/metal album. It packs a huge amount of overdriven punch with unusual amount of melody for the band.

The opener ‘Acheron/Unearthing the Orb’ muscles its way through with a hefty dose stacatto power rock and transgresses into the single ‘Tres Brujas’. In the past, Cronise has been criticised for, well, his “poor singing”, but this could be the album to shake that off his back. It is certainly more melodic, but sometimes Cronise lets loose an almost Ozzy sounding croon. There are almost elements of early-mid-metallica hidden in here, from the thrashy Ride The Lightning sounds to the end solo to ‘Astraea’s Dream’ which sounds incredibly similar to the Kirk Hammet’s solo on ‘Wherever I May Roam’. But amongst this are a few tracks with a heavier feel to them, such as the slower intro riffs and chunky open E riffing to ‘The Chronomancer III: Nemesis’. This more mature writing style adds a tremendous amount of dynamism to their overall sound, and the guitar lead work is also the best I have heard the band play. The Sword have side-stepped the company of bands such as Witchcraft to artists such as Priestess, and this “new” sound (and pretty sure still tuned down to C), will take a few existing fans by surprise.

[Originally published on TLOBF]

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