Stand To Reason
sWords Into Ploughshares
Detonate Records
By Jeff Karbow
Source: www.siczine.com

These four dudes are from the area of Mid-Hudson Valley, NY and play some quality hardcore that is heavily influenced by the likes of Trial and Earth Crisis. Unlike so many bands today, even the ones who claim SxE and Vegan, these guys have a purpose and reason for what they do. They believe in making a change for the better; helping their common brother and sister, trying to fix the environment and the animals in it and to make a better world for the coming generations.

There are 11 tracks, 9 songs total with the length of songs varying anywhere from 1:41 to over 4 minutes. The other two tracks are instrumental and at first I thought they took away from the flow of album but after giving this album plenty of spins they started to fit into the mix a lot more. I especially liked how "I Defy" flowed effortlessly into the next track "Guts". As mentioned above, these guys are heavily influenced by Trail and ExC, the vocals at some moments remind me of ExC and others of Trial. There is also no shortage of solid breakage and melodic goodness.

I've heard the term Swords Into Ploughshares before and figured it would be worthwhile to do a search on Wikipedia and this is what turned up:

Swords to ploughshares is a concept in which military weapons or technologies are converted for peaceful civilian applications. The plowshare is often used to symbolize creative tools that benefit mankind, as opposed to destructive tools of war, symbolized by the sword, a similar sharp metal tool with an arguably opposite use. The common expression "beat swords into plowshares" has been used by disparate social and political groups.

How are the lyrics? Fucking awesome. They are intelligent and well thought out and the message definitely carries weight. The bulk of the songs deal with not adhering to the mainstream way of life, reading between the lines, not believing what you hear, trying to make a better future, etc,. Overall, very good stuff.

The recording is more than enough to keep me appeased. I guess it doesn't hurt when Alan Douches at West West Side does the mastering either. The guitar tone: awesome. The bass tone: great presence and treble. The drums: dense with good consistency. The vocals: tasteful placement and no effects.

Pretty slick layout that has shit tons of lime green and high contrasted images. The front cover has a silhouetted scene of a factory and winter trees (you should be able to guess the ties considering the environmental stance the band takes) and the band name and album title is in a simple black font. I thought it was a nice touch to capitalize the W in "Swords Into Ploughshares", which I would assume shifts the meaning from tangible weapons to words as the real weapon. The inside of the booklet looks real good and uses the same color lime-green color scheme. There are also more contrasted images of trees and mountains on the bottom and city skylines on the top. In the middle of the three panels used to display the lyrics is a cool looking Rorschach inkblot.