Sword - Sweet Dreams

Aquarius Records / Roadracer Records 1989

Reviewed by Kloghole

I woke up this mornin’ dreaming that I was kicking my bloodhound’s face out of the toilet to take a fuckin’ piss after getting pissed off about some fuckin’ assholes not doin’ me right to the chorus riff of CDB’s “Legend of Wooly Swamp” runnin’ through my head (I was singing something in my dream to the effect of “I couldn’t believe it, you fuckin’ fucked me again this time, you mother fuckers ...” and then I realized I was straying off melody). As I realized that the bloodhound drinking water out of the toilet was really the fuckin’ sound of my goddam sump pump runnin’ and grateful that I didn’t piss the bed again to sound of fuckin’ runnin’ water, I was reminded how miserable my fuckin’ life really has been. I don’t know if it was my brother’s righteous fuckin’ homemade wine I finished two hours before or if it was the weird goddam dream, but now I am awake as the sun barely creeps across the horizon. Fuck it. If I go to bed, I will lose my thoughts and wake up even more pissed. That is the wonderful theme that has been constant throughout my life since at least Jr High, if not before. I can’t get to sleep because I’m pissed, and I really don’t care to wake up because, to quote Great White’s cover of The Angels, I don’t want to “Face the Day.”

I realize that there are people out there whose lives are indescribably worse than mine, but that is part of what troubles me. I alternate between pissed and fuckin’ suicidal, and I am not living in my car or ducking bullets. Well, my brother did have to hit the dirt when he crossed paths with my neighbors who were poaching every fucking living thing in sight. He had to dive in a ditch when they came marching through because bullets were whizzing all around him. These were some special people. The used their basement as a butcher shop where they would eviscerate their poached carcasses. The local newspaper reported that one brother turned the other brother in for stealing the gas can out of his boat. They used to steal gas out of our cars and lawn mower until my brother filled one tank with Coleman fluid. My Mom and brother enjoyed the show when their fuckin’ lawn mower blew up after they filled the fuckin’ thing with a goddam milk jug full of our “gas.” We had some other neighbors earlier that threw their own shit on our house - not dog shit, not cat shit, real it-came-out-out-of-a-redneck’s-ass people shit. One of the kids about my age ended up in the fuckin’ penitentiary. For a few bucks, or just kicks, he killed an elderly gentleman by standing on his neck in a few inches of water in a drainage ditch. What the fuck brings people to do this shit, and why the fuck do they have to live next door to me?

It wasn’t until college that I was able to place a name on the face of this misery. I took classes from an interesting little feller whose shirts never quite fit around his plump little belly. He was a thin dude, but he looked pregnant. As I wondered whether his buttons would pop, I learned about C. Wright Mills, the power elite, and Madison anti-war protests where he saw someone’s teeth dragged out of his face with a nightstick carved with ridges for maximum effect. As a long-haired, isolated youth who had been stopped and ticketed far too many times for non-violations, I resonated with the sociological insight. Fuck the police and the fuckin’ fuckers they fuckin’ serve.

What the fuck does this have to do with music? Well, jesus fuckin’ christ, let me get to it. Fuck. When I started listening to music, much of what I sought resonated with my trailer house, Banquet Chicken eatin’ fucking existence. I was in the same graduating class as many of the offspring of the town elite. The fuckin’ car dealership, the damn sports shop, the chiropractor, the town doctor, the fuckin’ manufactured home king, etc. We had a graduating class of 125, and I happened to be in the one with all the fuckin’ prima donnas. This stark contrast sent me to seek music that spoke to that vast inequality.

Slowly, I began to develop a taste for shit that said something deeper than my candle needs waxing and I’m out of beer. Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime said it explicitly, “while the banks get fat and the poor stay poor and the rich get rich and the cops get paid to look away as the one percent rules America” (say what you will about Queensryche, but read their fuckin’ lyrics if you are not too much of a neanderthal, knuckle dragging, inbred, sheep humpin’ shit stain). While watching Headbanger’s Ball, I saw this band I had never heard of performing this nice little ditty. The band was Sword (don’t fuckin’ confuse this with that new band, The Sword, who are too fuckin’ lazy to come up with their own goddam name, so they just add “The” to some other band’s name - how fuckin’ ridiculous), and the song was “The Trouble Is.”

While it is not the most overtly political album, Sword’s Sweet Dreams captures the Reagan era ass-fucking the working class people were going through at the time. While the actual lyrics of “The Trouble Is” are rather cryptic, there is that hint of righteous anger. “The trouble is; politicians rule with an iron hand. The trouble is; the threat’s alive among the living and the dead.” I resonate with “Children are crying, people are starving. We say we’re helpless, it’s their destiny.” It takes every fiber of my being to not strangle the fuckin’ life out some mental midget with a child-molester grin on their face that parrots the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mythology. Wake the fuck up. The intellectual diarrhea you spew is what keeps you struggling to pay your fuckin’ bills you stupid son-of-a-bitch. I love you, but fuck, get a goddam grip.

A more poignant lyrical gem is “Caught in the Act.” “It’s hard to be free when our sick society is caught in the act. You’re breaking the rules and you’re living like a fool who’s caught in a trap.” It may be a song about excessive imprisonment, which has only accelerated, but I saw it more as a mindless public swallowing swill - not only swallowing the swill, but enjoying it so much they convince their friends that it’s the next best thing. Nowadays, it has gotten so bad that if you repeated “cowshit is peanut butter” enough times on TV that the slack-jawed, redneck fuckin’ hillbillies that I love so fukin’ much would make a goddam sandwich out of the fuckin’ shit. Fuck, it’s depressing.

There is also a nice little anti-war song in there. “Land of the Brave” is a real swift kick in the shorts. “War; slaughters the earth. War; you’re sent to the front and your life is fading away.” The song is interesting because it is placed after the invasion of Grenada and before the invasion of Panama. This is at least three years before the penultimate civilian slaughter in Iraq. During the plethora of US war crimes, I recall blasting this album in rage, over and over again.

Even if you are one of those thick-headed, cheap beer drinking, cum stains who lives for objectifying women, you can look past all the lyrics that would make your tiny little brain actually fire a few neurons for a change and listen to the riffs that really do shred. Those three songs are probably my favorite in that order, but there are some more crushers in here. This is straight 80's metal, so keep it in perspective, but “Back Off,” “Prepare to Die,” and “State of Shock” are all solid hooky tunes. “Life on the Sharp Edge” has the frontman, Rick Hughes screeching out the chorus, almost on the verge of out of his range, but it still works. Sword only put out two albums, and this is the superior of the two. I recently saw the first, Metalized, in a used record store, but they are pretty rare. If you can get your hand on this gem, for fuck sake don’t pass it up. You can buy that Taylor Swift album in the used bin in a couple weeks.

Well, that brings me to where I opened this little rant. I got to go back to bed sometime. Fuck. Maybe it is because I am tired or because this is a band that really should have had a longer run, but I have to give this album three sweet sticky balls. Sweet dreams mother fuckers.