Sword II
Electric Hour
SECTION1
It’s Partisan Records’ world, we’re just living in it. Not content with putting out some of the best indie/alt records of the year with Geese and Just Mustard, their “joint-venture” subsidiary label section1 also released the great new Blonde Redhead collection and are ending the year with Sword II’s strange, stellar second album, Electric Hour. The Atlanta trio make for intuitive bedfellows among these innovative peers, crafting music that feels simultaneously striking and approachable, easy to grasp but also subtly experimental.
In the post-pandemic years, “indie rock” has become an increasingly nebulous term. A bunch of older forms have been reanimated and then (sometimes) deconstructed, notably the interconnected shoegaze and dream pop subgenres. While a crop of acts are content to craft retro nu-gaze that relies on ’90s/’00s signifiers, acts like Sword II, along with the likes of They Are Gutting a Body of Water and Feeble Little Horse, continue to find new avenues to explore within these now 40-year-old sounds. Sword II’s take sees them invent a warped, melodic, and joyously experimental version of dream pop, one that also oozes personality and emotion.
This is the type of rock music that can only be birthed within a fertile, radical DIY scene. Sword II have spoken extensively about the world in which Electric Hour was born, from recording it in a studio space so run down that it was frequently electrocuting them, to a broader backdrop of friends being raided by the FBI in connection with Atlanta’s Stop Cop City movement. These 10 tracks feel as equally charged and radical. It’s impressive that a work of lush, dreamy rock music can also feel this potent and quietly audacious. There are so many kaleidoscopic ideas on display here that feel effortlessly, memorably unique, from the delicate, fuzzed-out hardcore of “Who’s Giving You Love” to Mari González’s high-register melodies on “Sugarcane,” down to the tiny touches like the bell that opens and closes “Passionate Nun” or the abrasive mid-song pick scrape on “Gun You Hold.”
Innovation sometimes looks startlingly, blindingly new. However, it can also be as incremental and accessible as the light-touch, emotionally charged psych-gaze that Sword II are creating here. The zenith of Electric Hour is the final track, “Even If It’s Just a Dream.” Imagine an array of aughts indie acts—Deerhunter, Real Estate, Beach Fossils—filtered through the brain of an even more open-minded and open-hearted contemporary and you’re halfway there. Its densely textured outro and cautiously optimistic outlook will have you feeling like you’re walking on air, buzzing from being shown the myriad possibilities that “gaze”-adjacent music still has left in its old tank.
