Album Review: The Sword - Used Future

The world didn't react very kindly to The Sword's last album of original material, High Country.

And to be fair, it wasn't surprising given the album consisted of a hodgepodge of southern fried rock instead of the fuzzed out stoner/doom (The Music described it as… ahem… "brave") that the band's considerable fan base expected from them.

Used Future, The Sword's sixth album, starts off promisingly, with a slew of tracks that boast straight up heavy riffs, a fuzzed up bottom end and vocalist John D. Cronise churning out his most convincing Ozzy Osbourne impersonation to date. However, come Sea Of Green and things go awry as the unconvincing Allman Brothers/Lynyrd Skynyrd descend from nowhere and ruin the next brace of tracks. There are flashes of brilliance, such as the main riff on Book Of Thoth, but overall the band never recover. Used Future won't do much to recover lost fans - the peaks of the record such as The Wild Sky don't match the band's earlier work, and the rest see the band continue on a very uncertain path.

It will be very interesting to see whether The Sword can weather yet more disappointed long-term fans.