The Sword

The classic Sabbath/Led Zep/Motörhead style of metal is like one of cooking's essential "mother sauces" — add just a few ingredients to that basic combination of cranked guitars, power drumming, and howled lyrics and you get all kinds of new flavors. Incorporate some mechanized beats and samples and you'll have industrial-metal. Quadruple the tempo and toss in some monumental shredding and you've got speed metal. Push the tempo even further and fold in some Cookie Monster vocals, and voilà . . . grindcore! But sometimes you just crave the simple-yet-sublime taste of that unadorned mother sauce, and that's where The Sword comes in. Like High on Fire and Wolfmother, this blazing Texas quartet does metal the old-school, elemental way — with tons of low, thick, doomy, chugging guitar riffs and the sporadic short solo hammered into your skull with thunderous beats and evil grooves while an Ozzy/Lemmy-like singer wails away. Tasty!!