I’ve been reading a lot of hype surrounding Austin, Texas’ The Sword. Their latest full length offering, Gods Of The Earth, has been garnering a lot of good press, so I figured I’d give it a listen to see if the people writing reviews for these metal mags speak the truth or are talking out of their ass.

Considering I already know that metal zine writers are completely full of shit and have less knowledge about metal than my American Idol-worshiping mother (though she is a lovely woman, and a wonderful cook, hi mom!) I already knew that The Sword were going to be over hyped, but I just wasn’t sure how much until I stuck this disc in my stereo and pressed play.

The instrumental diarrhea that spewed out of my speakers can best be described as sloppy-as-fuck Black Sabbath worship with really shitty vocals. The riffs are so simplistic even I could play them. The thing that makes me crack up endlessly is it sounds like this stoner rock-by-numbers material is too technical for these four idiots to be able to play competently. How fucking hard is it to play a simple steady rhythm? The guitar tone is distorted to the maximum level in an apparent attempt to make the mistakes not sound so noticeable, but, Jesus fucking Christ, these guys are shitty musicians.

The guitar playing is atrocious, I heard more competent riffing in my grade 4 music class when my entire class of 9 year olds plucked away "You Are My Sunshine" and "He’s Got The Whole World" on ukuleles. The drumming is just as bad, it sounds like the producer just got tired of having this retard play the same song over and over poorly and just decided he’d had enough.

The vocals have the typical Ozzy Osbourne-era Black Sabbath effects, only done at about half volume. I’m not complaining that the vocals were buried in the mix, since they fucking suck anyway.

I’ve seen this band praised in countless magazines and websites, calling The Sword a brilliant doom metal band. Doom metal? Really? Are you high? Either you’re smoking meth or you’re just really stupid, because this shit is about as doom metal as Hannah Montana. Bottom line is The Sword fucking suck, even for hippy stoner rock this shit is dreadful. No effort was put into songwriting, the musicianship is laughably bad, the vocals are shit and if that weren’t sad enough, the lyrics look like they were written by a third grader. If you like this shitty band, you should dive headfirst into a wood chipper. What a piece of shit! Written By: Teufel