Swords
Metropolis
Arena Rock
2005
B




e live in this awful cascade of shit and steel, this aggregate of strangers we call a metropolis. Everyone’s here by circumstance and bad luck rather than volition and motivated solely by the need to fill their stomachs regularly; filling up your soul is something left to those with free time. So we saunter through this matrix like limp wraiths so accustomed to our own anomie that, should happiness fall into our laps, I mean right into our laps, we’d discard it because it was new. Everyone’s so defunct, so incorrigibly locked into an unthinking vibration that we don’t even notice our expiration.
So here we are. Out in the open, in broad daylight
From-so-deep inside of the world
That even lamp light burns your skin …
Build a sense of dread using light and pace
A sense of mystery through use of light and space
Get a wide shot of the pleasant faces …

Is this the product of harm?
Swords—originally going by the title of Swords Project—had previously touched on themes of public alienation and disenchantment, bathing their sound in a muffled gray haze emblematic of the Portland skies the sextet came from. Entertainment is Over if You Want It was a fitting title for their debut, marking the subtleties of the music therein. The trenchant post-rock sound helped substantiate their message, keeping it from dissolving into naked polemics against the hand-over-fist consumerist personality of modern culture and desensitization.

Metropolis begins with the lyrics quoted above, Corey Ficken singing this time without the fog of their debut. In fact, the music in general stands in contrast to their prior output precisely because of its sonic and thematic clarity. This time around concomitance is emphasized more often, violinist Liza Rietz filtering her playing throughout the album rather than offering a decoupled juxtaposition with the other members. The elegance is thus not only more rarefied, but the concentration involved is wholly palpable. “Land Speed Record,” effectively the album’s emotional and sonic apogee, is driven by drummer Evan Railton but never sublimates the rest of the band.

Quite a bit of Metropolis falls closer to an alternative/indie locus with its shimmering guitars on songs like “The Mark,” but it incorporates post-rock elements (the lightly electronic break in the middle) as a soft weight. The pop-like guitars that begin “Savage Republic” give way to a more distorted personality until, a little past the halfway mark, the two converge in an impressive wall. Their sense of balance is laudable, as none of the tracks ever feel imbalanced.

Yet it’s the thematic cohesiveness that rises above all else; the exacting lyrics and solid musicianship behind them. Swords managed to leave breathing room, a commendable feat considering how many others would have used the same ideas as license to suffocate the listener with didactic, vacuous echolalia. Additionally, they didn’t view their admittedly infelicitous subject matter as somehow requiring a huskier or aggressive musical stance. Instead they merely cleaned up their sound, so to speak, and gave it a single-mindedness so that more electronic fare like “Family Photographs” doesn’t stand disconnected from the rest.

You could easily envision Metropolis slipping into some hackneyed hodgepodge of Orwellian upchuck, but the exact opposite conclusion is reached. Instead, the ten songs here signify a genuinely novel advance of an old theme. The ascent and accumulation of the plastic anchors of our culture, the belief that our construct of a world has given way to a deadening collective anomie is nothing novel in and of itself. But the literate and layered manner with which Swords presents these facts makes Metropolis an outstanding work.