Here's the thing about lyrics about witches and dragons and firequests: You have to believe them. Or if you don't believe them, you at least have to sell them. Robert Plant and Ozzy Osbourne and Bruce Dickinson sold the living hell out of their silliness. And even an album as recent as High on Fire's truly badass 2010 offering, Snakes for the Divine, made its power-fantasies work, since Matt Pike grunted and growled that stuff as hard as he possibly could. J.D. Cronise, frontman for Austin retro-metal dudes the Sword, doesn't sell his lyrics. On Warp Riders, Cronise gets into some serious Lord of the Rings nerdery; a line about "the properties of certain herbs" is one of the first lyrics on the whole album. But Cronise doesn't sound like he believes these lyrics, and he also doesn't sound like he's kidding. The lines just lay there, absolutely distinguishable but rendered inert when Cronise belts them out in a flat, monotonal wail.
Of course, this whole thing is nothing new, and the Sword have barely altered their crunch-rock one bit over three albums. But their 2006 debut album, Age of Winters, pulled all its time-tested tricks with assurance and teeth, vrooming from one Sabbath-style stomp-riff to the next at exactly the right moment. The 2008 follow-up, Gods of the Earth, had a bit of that same punch, too, but that unceasingly trad sound feels a bit tapped-out on Warp Riders. On those first two albums, Cronise himself served as producer. For Warp Riders, the band has recruited Matt Bayles, who has two of the past decade's greatest and most influential underground-metal landmarks, Isis' Oceanic and Mastodon's Leviathan, on his résumé. But as a producer, Cronise was actually way more attuned to the Camaro-ready riff-rock that the Sword does best. On Warp Riders, that same approach seems overly compressed and washed out, the riffs themselves just not connecting as hard even though the band is playing them the same way they always have.
But then, maybe that sameness is the problem. The Sword's songs seem to follow the same basic blueprint: Opening-riff trudge, part where Cronise sings about magic, solo, more crunching, more magic, another solo. Even on the instrumental tracks here, you barely miss the vocals, since the other stuff sticks so closely to what came before. We get a few stylistic switchups, but none of them go far enough-- the approaching-thrash speed of "Astraea's Dream" and the vaguely ZZ Top blues throb of "Lawless Lands" don't exactly qualify as bold reinventions. Instead, the album just pounds on and on and on, feeling much longer than its 48 minutes. None of it is awful, and some of the soloing is truly impressive, but it's tough to figure out why this album needs to exist at all.
Then, after final track "(The Night Sky Cried) Tears of Fire" fades out, we get the album's one and only left turn: A minute or so of legitimately creepy Goblin-sounding gothy synth. That part sounds really good! And if the Sword are capable of making stuff like that, why not find a way for it to work within the rest of the album? Maybe next time.
