The Sword broke up last year. I found out last week.
This will be a deeply personal nostalgia post mostly written for myself.
Finally I found the crone, walking through the trees.
She looked in my eyes, and she recited these words to me:
The Sword had a lot of good tracks. They meant a lot to me, and I'll miss them.
He felt on his trip that every place stirs up an emotion, and every emotion invokes a memory: a time and a location. So couldn't he find the Princess now, tonight, just by wandering from place to place and noticing how he feels? A trail of feelings, of awe and inspiration, should lead him to that castle: in the future: her arms enclosing him, her scent fills him with excitement, creates a moment so strong he can remember it in the past.
-- Braid, World 4
I never followed The Sword closely. I didn't eagerly await news of new albums or tours from them. I've had their tracks in rotation for about as long as I've been listening to music, using them as background accompaniment occasionally punctuated by news that a new album had released months or a year ago.
Sort of like hearing that a comet came by, and you missed it because, honestly, you just don't like staying up all night stargazing, but you do like to know that comets exist.
Now the comet isn't coming back, so I want to reflect on my memories of The Sword, as they tie into my memories of my own life and self.
I read somewhere that music is the only art form that's purely evocative. Bear with me, I might have phrased that wrong. Visual artworks like paintings, photographs, and movies can look like real things. Literary artworks can sound like real things. Maybe poetry and lyrics blur the line - They are literarature set to music.
But the instruments themselves aren't "like" anything. Can anyone say that a track is too realistic, or unrealistic? I think in this sense, music might be the purest art form. You can write a piece of music with no words, that isn't "about" any event, even a fictional event, and it can evoke feelings in listeners. That's amazing.
A sword of fire, and an axe of cold.
In November 2006, Guitar Hero II released on the PlayStation 2 game console.
The game's track list included Freya, the single from Age of Winters, The Sword's first album.
I was in high school at the time, and I spent most of the next summer trying to get good enough at Guitar Hero to be competitive with my friends who seemed to play effortlessly.
They say that one's taste in music is established as a teenager.
15 years later, I still mostly listen to video game soundtracks.
At some point I got my dad to buy me the first 2 Sword albums in a 2-CD box set - Age of Winters and Gods of the Earth.
At the time I was also playing through a no-CD crack of Red Faction. Red Faction came out in 2001, 3 years after Half-Life, with a similar vibe as a sci-fi action shooter with set pieces and lots of different weapons. I think Red Faction also copied a lot from the 1990 film Total Recall. By the time I'm old, I will realize that all sci-fi is just Phillip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, all the way down.
So these feelings are all clumped together in my memory:
I think Sword fans widely agree that Age of Winters and Gods of the Earth are not like other Sword albums. They're heavier and doomier. I don't begrudge The Sword this. Maybe they got tired. Maybe they only had 2 albums' worth of ideas for heavy doomy stuff.
I vote Age of Winters "Best Sword album to listen to, while stranded during a year-long winter, in an ancient castle," and Gods of the Earth "Most Sword album to actually have a sword in the cover art".
After this, things change.
We heard the sound of a cosmic choir, the night the sky cried tears of fire
Warp Riders came out during my last year of college. I have less to say about it - I was busy with school at the time. I did not buy it on CD when it came out - I think I ripped a few songs from YouTube, or pirated it, or something. I own the CD now.
One person on Reddit called Warp Riders a "perfect album", that is, they asserted it has no bad tracks. I don't know about that. It has boring tracks. It is one of my least-re-listened Sword albums.
Maybe, like Age of Winters and Gods of the Earth, I simply played it to death. I remember a time between 2013 and 2016 when I flirted with the idea of learning to sing, and I practiced singing some of the songs from Warp Riders, in the shower of my apartment.
And I remember an easy Literary Analysis class, my senior year of college, where I presented Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians for some media analysis project that the teacher certainly assigned for fun. (Another student presented "Hellfire", from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, so.)
But I don't have memories of Warp Riders when it was published.
I vote Warp Riders "Sword album whose final track sounds the most like a farewell to the band".
And what if all you've seen are lies, when the veil lifts from your eyes?
Apocryphon came out in 2012, about the time I was recovering from a mental health episode. I changed up a few things in my life after 2012 - I started going to anime conventions with my then-friend, now-spouse, and I joined an Ultimate Frisbee group that met at a local park. Neither of those things lasted forever, but they were good while they lasted.
I distinctly remember riding the brakes on my car, downhill towards the Ultimate Frisbee park, while listening to Apocryphon.
I also remember the only Sword concert I ever attended:
I later tried to learn electric guitar by following Kyle's video on how to play Apocryphon. As of 2023, I have not learned how to play electric guitar. Or any guitar.
I vote Apocryphon "Sword album most likely composed after J.D. binged all of Ancient Aliens in one night".
Summer nights, silent trees, fireflies, like galaxies.
The summer of 2015 was a good one. I had been having a good time at conventions for a couple years, the Frisbee group was an excuse to exercise every week even though I was consistently picked last for teams and didn't really get along with anyone else in the group.
My first encounter with High Country was a post on the subreddit /r/TheSword, some fancam footage of the title track debuting at a concert on New Year's 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRg4InKZYzM.
I think I bought High Country when it came out. I vaguely remember seeing it at Best Buy, grabbing it, unwrapping it with my pocket knife in the car, sticking it in, and immediately driving to Frisbee. Probably this exact sequence of events did not happen, but it could have.
I vote High Country "Only Sword album with a song I can't listen to, because it makes me cry for some reason".
Time is a mortal's master, just a word to the wise,
Don't get too comfortable, it'll cut you down to size.
I didn't buy Used Future until 2021, although I probably heard a few of the tracks on Pandora Radio before that.
An entire decade of stuff happened for me between 2015 and 2021.
So I bought Used Future about a year into my self-imposed COVID lockdown.
The years of 2019, 2020, and 2021 are something of a blur already. Some of our casual friendships fell apart due to COVID. Or due to other reasons.
2019 was "only" 4 years ago, but 4 years is also the amount of time one spends in American high school. The entire time from graduating junior high to graduating high school is a long time.
I guess I appreciate that 4 years of adulthood can still feel long. I have no desire to age any faster or experience less as I age.
Although it was released before 2019, the single Hammer of Heaven makes me think of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Gather all the young ones, and listen as we tell,
Of days of old, when the Earth was whole, before the hammer fell.
Once, there were cities, of steel, and massive stone.
Where now lie only ruins, of dust, and ash, and bone.
2011-2012 and 2019-2020 are both moments that divide my life into "before" and "after", probably everyone can say that about 2020. I sometimes jokingly refer to pre-2020 as "Before the Hammer fell."
So it's weird to reflect on Used Future, as part of the "after". I've been listening to The Sword in some form or another, for more than half my life. I don't know how I feel about this kind of "through-line", this constant that stays with me all the time.
"How lucky I am, to have had something so good that I cry when it's gone." -- (I can't remember the source. I want to say Winnie The Pooh.)
Is it good to have something to be nostalgic about? Is it bad to wallow in nostalgia? How much wallowing is too much? Can I ever gain any useful insight about myself from how I see these memories and these songs that bring me to them?
For The Wild Sky, I award Used Future the high distinction of "Sword album that has the best instrumental that's just one really good riff, repeated again and again".
Because amaranthe never fades, as we live out our days,
It will grow on our graves, when our bones have all turned to dust.
I vote The Sword the band that I liked the most for the longest.
I like them more than DragonForce. I've liked more of their songs than those of Black Sabbath, for longer than I've known about Judas Priest.
Go before the maiden, fall down to your knees,
Should you win her favor, she may tell you what she sees.
2023 06Jun 22