By: Terry Vickroy (DJ TV)
The Sword: High Country
High Country is the fifth studio album from Texan metal band The Sword. Throughout their career, this band has slowly been evolving their sound. They’ve gone from an old school metal style (Age of Winters and Gods of the Earth) to a more hard rock feel on their recent albums (Warp Riders and Apocryphon). Due to this, I was very curious to see where High Country would land stylistically.
Right away you can tell this album is going to be something different with the instrumental intro, “Unicorn Farm”. It’s got tons of synths and even a clap track. While it was a decent intro, I found this very jarring. This not what I expected a Sword album to sound like. I’m all for a band trying something a bit different, but it really depends on if they can pull it off.
The first half of High Country is pretty decent. They have some sweet riffs and I can almost embrace the style they are going for. They aren’t the greatest songs of their career, but it mostly hits the mark. It’s not till you hit the track “Seriously Mysterious” that it starts to fall apart. This song is just ridiculous. They try to pull off a funky psychedelic rock vibe, but it just doesn’t work. It’s pretty much all synth and the vocals fall flat. I can appreciate the Sword trying to get out of their comfort zone, but this doesn’t work for me. The rest of the album suffers from this as well. They get too ambitious and the songs suffer for it.
High Country has some good tracks, but it’s very hit or miss. They have fully embraced their hard rock roots, but it really doesn’t do it for me. There are tons of synths, generic riffs, and strange experimentation. If you are a Sword fan, this is not the sound you are used to hearing. All this experimentation has brought down the album and given us their weakest album by far.
2/5
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