XL: SXSW

Piercing metal from the Sword

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, March 16, 2006

When most people imagine South by Southwest, they hear the rootsy twang of alternative country, the hyper buzz of indie rock or the polite strum of singer-songwriters.

They do not necessarily hear the 1500-cc engine roar of heavy metal.

And yet plenty of metal bands — doom metal, thrash metal, punk metal, every sort of subgenre — will blow out club amps all over town this week.

Festival creative director Brent Grulke explains it thusly: "Hipsters like metal now. In the punk era and post-punk aftermath, punk and metal were enemies. Maybe it was OK to like Motorhead, but that's it," he says, laughing.

The Sword, the breakout Austin metal band, exemplifies the hipster and hesher roots. They clearly love classic bands such as Motorhead and Black Sabbath, as well as progressive, doomy metal acts such as Sleep and the Melvins.

A week ago, they were criss-crossing the country with fellow indie metal acts Early Man and Priestess.

"We're a couple of miles outside of Cleveland," Sword bassist Bryan Richie mumbled into his cell phone. "Wait a second, I have to pay a toll."

Well, it's no "Hello, Cleveland!" in front of a packed arena, but it's entirely possible the Sword will one day roll into Austin's Erwin Center in a tricked-out tour bus, even if they are still touring in a van right now.

With lumbering riffs that recall everyone from Sabbath to Slayer and a galloping beat that swings as much as it pounds, the Sword — vocalist/guitarist J.D. Cronise, guitarist Kyle Shutt, drummer Trivett Wingo and Richie — are the most promising metal band Austin has produced in a decade.

Cronise dreamed up the Sword nearly three years ago and wrote material soon after. The current lineup solidified in April 2004 as the band took the hard rock and punk rock clubs that dot Red River Street by storm. They weren't the most original act in the world, but they put the pieces together better than anyone else around Austin.

Comic book writer Alan Moore once commented about stretching within a genre, as the Sword does in the metal range.

The trick is not in crafting work as good as what inspired it, he wrote in the introduction to a collection of the comic "Hellboy," "but in the more demanding task of crafting work as good as everyone remembers the original as being."

This sort of relationship to metal's past is exactly what makes the Sword work; they take what was wonderful about the metal — the energy, the heft, the implied chaos — and make it their own. Having conquered Mount Doom — or at least the village that Mount Bonnell overlooks — and after a wildly popular turn at last year's South by Southwest, they formally signed with upstart semi-indie Kemado Records last fall and released "Age of Winters" on Valentine's Day of this year. They play 1 a.m. Friday at Buffalo Billiards as part of the Kemado showcase.

Richie says last year's SXSW wasn't that big a deal for them. "We played a really short time and there were a lot of people there that we didn't know," he says with a laugh. "But I definitely enjoyed it."

While rumors abounded that the band cut a deal as a direct result of their SXSW set, Richie says Kemado (which is distributed by Universal) began a relationship with the band prior to the festival.

"And it wasn't like we got off the stage and people were throwing clipboards at us," he says of potentially competing offers.

Nevertheless, they were the local standouts from last year's festival, garnering positive press all over the place.

As Margaret Myrick succinctly put it in this newspaper: "The Sword managed to remind us what was so great about classic metal days."

Writer Chuck Klosterman called them "the best band I saw (at SXSW)," saying they sounded "like a bunch of bison being pushed over a cliff" in Spin magazine.

Suddenly, the Sword were the toast of metal insiders, local kings of a scene that suddenly feels like a crucial part of the SXSW mix.

Metal's mettle

Grulke says metal has been a part of the festival for its entire history, no matter how the definition of metal has changed.

"The one thing everyone can agree that metal has to be is loud," Grulke said, "And the Back Room (Austin's traditional metal club) has been a (SXSW) venue from day one."

While the number of metal bands at SXSW has varied over the years (this go-round about 30 bands could be identified as such) one metal band made SXSW history: Austin's own hair farmers Dangerous Toys.

Grulke says the Toys, in 1988, were the first band to sign a major label contract directly from rocking out at at a SXSW showcase.

Which wasn't a huge surprise — that was the year after Guns 'n' Roses broke. "There was a period of time when metal bands were the biggest bands that there were," Grulke says. "Metal was the pop music — it was natural that there would be more industry attention at that time."

One label that has been coming to South by Southwest on a regular basis is Relapse Records. Founded in 1990 by Matt Jacobson, Relapse grew from a bedroom label run by the then 18-year-old Jacobson to one of the most influential metal labels around.

Jacobson says he set up showcases at SXSW seven years ago for the same reasons other label heads do: "It had a reputation for not only being a great place to meet others in the industry, but it was focused on music rather than purely business."

But Jacobson says it helped that his bands maintained prior relationships with Austin clubs, and that helped shove a foot in the door at SXSW.

"When we had Unsane and Neurosis, they were bands that had a good relationship with venues such as Emo's, and we were able to build a showcase around them," he says.

This is an important point — Emo's was known as a punk club, and both Unsane and Neurosis fostered roots in the punk and indie rock scenes. Relapse is a label that attracts as many punk fans as metal fans.

"The primary thing that's changed is the punk/metal divide has vanished," Grulke says. "I don't think it's especially strange now that someone who likes Belle and Sebastian might also like a metal band."

But why is this? Jacobson has built a business on this shift and sees a couple of factors at play. "More and more people are more open-minded," Jacobson says, perhaps echoing Grulke's notion, but from the perspective of the metal fan.

"Once there were people who only liked death metal, or only liked black metal, or just one particular subgenre of metal," Jacobson continues. "Now, metal is just one of many things they listen to. When fans are in a certain mood, they'll listen to anything from Coldplay to extreme noise."

As with everything else, the Internet helps. "There are so many outlets for extreme metal, from Web pages to MySpace to iTunes to satellite radio," Jacobson says. "People used to think metal died when MTV canceled 'Headbanger's Ball.' That's not true anymore."

Looking beyond the choir

These days, metal bands have all sorts of reasons to come to SXSW. The Savannah, Ga., band Baroness sits right on that punk/metal divide — though they look like crusty punks, their songs could be enjoyed by your average King Crimson fan.

(They played their SXSW showcase Thursday, but you can catch Baroness at 7 p.m. Friday at the Chunklet/Monitor/Buddyhead party at Sound On Sound Records and Room Service on East North Loop Boulevard.)

While Baroness singer/guitarist John Baizley says the band's application was denied last year, this year they hope to expand their audience.

"We've spent the past three years playing a very specialized circuit," Baizley says. "We've only played with bands that are on similar levels to us, and we pretty much know everybody and it's all familiar faces coming out to see us. After a while, you're just preaching to the choir and that's not the reason we play."

Who knows? Maybe they can be the next genre-smiting Sword that cuts a brutal swath through SXSW.