Photos and Review by Tyler Sterling

The audience at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse took their protein pills and put their helmets on for a cosmic retelling of The Sword’s seminal album, Warp Riders. The band ripped through the soaring riffs and fantastical storytelling in one session, as it was meant to be told. 

It was a packed house for the two openers as they prepared the venue for launch. Moon Destroys led the charge, delivering agile guitar chops and superstitious lyrics. Then, Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol had the crowd swirling around the room with their special blend of Texas herbs and spices. 

It wasn’t long after The Sword took the stage, that the crowd began nodding along to the familiar rhythms of “Empty Temples”, “High Country” and “Sea of Green”. Yes, these tracks are not from Warp Riders. They were plucked from other albums in their colorful discography like appetizers. 

After testing the waters, The Sword played an incendiary cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to cleanse the palette and prepare for an uninterrupted session the audience eagerly came to see in its entirety.  

Cheers and anticipation built as they began with “Ancheron/Uneathering The Orb”. The setlist felt like one continuous jam with different chapters bookmarked by each pummeling song. The spaced out intro of “Astraea’s Dream” gave the band and audience a moment to breathe before the slow bone crushing power chords reclaimed the energy. The wall of sound quickly spiraled into a thrashed out uptempo surge. 

Seeing a group perform a record on an anniversary tour can sometimes yield mixed results. It can be difficult to recapture the energy of the work as the years pile up. The Sword proved that time is relative. It works differently in space. The world has changed a lot since 2010, but their sound doesn’t age when it lives out of time.