'Warp Riders', the third album from Austin TX bruisers The Sword, is the first release from the band to feature an 'outside' producer - their first two albums, 2006's 'Age Of Winters' and 2008's 'Gods Of The Earth', being self-produced. This time Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Isis, Pearl Jam) is at the controls and he has fashioned some kind of metal monster....

.....a metal monster of a concept album. Yeah, a concept album. 'Warp Riders' tells the story of Ereth, an archer banished from his tribe on the planet Acheron, a planet that has undergone a tidal lock which has caused one of its sides to be scorched by three suns, the other enshrouded in perpetual darkness. Now, you may well be thinking exactly the same as I was thinking the first time I read that. Sure, the sci-fi storyline is ambitious but I have a different concept - if an album is packed with big riffs and great tunes then I'm in. Thankfully, this is the case with 'Warp Riders'.

Split into two parts - 'Part I : The Archer & The Orb' and 'Part II : The Android & The Sword' - the album is an exercise in retro rock guitar. Vocalist/guitarist J.D. Cronise inhabits a vocal territory somewhere between vintage Ozzy and pre-wig Gene Simmons and leads his band of sci-fi hi-fi rock warriors through a batch of songs that can, happily, be listened to without really buying into the concept. The band and their long-term fans may balk at the idea but, hey, mention the words 'Concept' and 'Album' to many and they're more likely to go headlong into a brick wall than headlong into the depth of this album. Like the work of the aforementioned Mastodon, people will listen if they know that they can dip in without really buying into the whole shebang.

That being said, this album is so consistently good that I'm sure that many will fall arrow, line and sinker for the band, concept, back catalogue, everything. Big fat riffs from a few decades ago crush skulls at every available opportunity and vocals of a 70's vintage sweet-talk the listener into really wanting Ereth to discover a mysterious orb and a crew of space pirates with a vessel that will alter the course of history. The name of said vessel? The Sword.

The term 'Classic Rock' is thrown around with such gay abandon nowadays that I think people have really lost sight of what that genre actually sounds like, so faint have the lines of definition been blurred by convenience. Let me make it simple for you: if you like the thought of 70's heavy metal, duelling guitars and Sabbath-cursed stoner rock sharply produced to teeth-rattling contemporary levels then this album is for you. A future cult classic.

www.myspace.com/thesword