There's something incredible about the ability that stoners have for coming up with primal, paganish, pre-historic, utterly unsettling one-word band names: Tusk, Mastodon, Earth, Mare, and Sleep all immediately jump to mind. The Sword also fits neatly into this list, with their quasi-elegiac penchant for the beasts, bloody battles, and mythologies of yore. And probably pot too.

If you've listened to Age of Winters you already know that the Sword will likely making many appearances on those "Year in Review" lists that music nerds are already worrying about. Also, if you've listened to Age of Winters you've probably gone ahead and compared The Sword to at least a couple of the aforementioned bands. But not so fast, Bryan Ritchie warned ChalkedUp over the phone from Texas--not so fast, man.

"I think it's funny to read what what other people think of us," Ritchie said, "I've been reading the Stonerrock.com forums specifically. Some people are really into [The Sword] but then there's a lot of people that think we're just suckin' Matt Pikes' dick and all that kinda stuff."

"I don't mind being compared to Sleep," he continued later, "I think Holy Mountain is a great record. Obviously though if you are going to compare us to Sleep I would hope that you would have at least listened to the record first."

Regardless of any similarity of style between Sleep and The Sword or Sabbath or any other stoner-metal/rock band, Age of Winters is an impressive album. It is straightforwardly brutal and indelibly groovy. But there's always something to be said about effective song-writing that isn't self-consciously technical. Shit, that's what truly good rock music is all about and The Sword have managed to keep a good portion of discerning metalheads happy yet still remain palatable to people who like their tunes to follow a regular beat.

Having played in a math-metal band for 3 or 4 years prior to his involvement with The Sword, Ritchie gave up number crunching for something a little more straightforward. "As a musician I try to picture myself as a consumer of music and of the music I'm creating," he said, "You want to make it listenable for a mass audience where it's like 'Alright, this is cool, I don't have to think that everytime my 7th head-bob is going to be on the downbeat rather than the upbeat." Sounds like a sell-out, but Ritchie also stressed how happy The Sword are with their independent label (Kemado). Plus, nobody has patience for tech-metal anymore anyway.

That said, Bryan was careful to explain how thorough the writing process is for The Sword. "It takes a long time," he explained, "it's not something like 'Oh yea, just put a drum beat here.' Everything is very calculated--how it's going to effect your head and all that stuff." With that in mind, he also commented that the band's new material might start to get a little more technical. "It'll definitely get out of the key of C and start hanging out in B, for instance, and F#," he joked, "But yea, I think that we're all getting more comfortable playing our instruments with each other because prior to me joining the band I had never played with any of those guys before."

Even prior to the release of Age of Winters The Sword had critics and fans excited after their performance at 2005's SXSW (one critic compared the band to "a bunch of bison being pushed over a cliff"; sucks that it ruined the whole thing when he mentioned Iron Maiden). What's even more impressive is that they did it all standing still. "We pretty much stand in the same general area, headbang along to the music and then just execute it tenfold over which the CD is," Ritchie said, "When you see the Sword you're not only gonna get it exactly like it sounds on the record, but it's probably gonna be a little more brutal."

The record sounds pretty fucking huge.