The Sword guitar player Kyle Shutt tackles the popular Pink Floyd album Dark Side Of The Moon. Fab idea or folly? Gov’t Mule got there first but in dub style, of course. He says he wanted to do a heavy version of Time and it all went from there…

Speak To Me sounds for the first minute like a flying saucer crash and then the familiar chords of Breathe ring out on the acoustic. This song was if course a straight lift off David Crosby’s Cowboy Movie from his first solo album. At 3.09 all hell breaks out with the OTT guitars. Then we are into On The Run which initially sounds like random noise over a sequencer. It is pretty annoying, with music shop drum testing bashing away. Kyle has brought in members of The Sword, Brownout, Brown Sabbath, Hard Proof et al to make these sounds.

Time is a fabulous song and I enjoy performing it in one of my lineups, just changed the key down a tone for my voice. The number sums up nebulous late Autumn afternoons of yore in suburban England and you can see the mist and smell the bonfires. The lyric is more reflective than carping, as many of Waters’ are. Shutt swamps it in fuzztone and distortion plus heavy-handed stickwork. It’s a bit like putting the Mona Lisa into a lime-green plastic frame. And I’m not precious about rearranging songs in any way. When the singing starts, the original is reproduced phrase for phrase, with whiney guitars. The tenderness of the composition is battered out of existence. Really I can’t see the point of this steamroller approach. A sax struggles through the cavernous mix.

The Great Gig In The Sky commences with tremelo setting electric piano pushing chords out slowly. A greasy sax murmers in the background. Are the tattoed behemoths still round the pub? At 2:00 the drumming starts to rough it all up a tad. Money gets going with that familiar bass plod. Then the heavy guys come crashing in. The vocals are clear but add no new dimension to the song, no fresh nuances a all. I hope they have no plans to bludgeon to treat Saucerful of Secrets this way..

Us And Them again has the soft intro and winsome chords you know well. Barely discernible reverse delay guitar can be made out in the backing. The vocal again duplicates the phrasing of the original. I think the keys of Joe Cornetti are heard here and are pretty good. Four minutes in they are all bashing away. Any Colour You Like has a wah’d intro and pounding bass. It goes atonal pretty often. Brain Damage has a cheesy deep vocal and some fine bass runs. Finally, Eclipse gets the thunderous treatment.

Would anyone prefer to listen to this rather than the Floyd original record? Not this listener, but the manifest competence of the players does make me want to hear more of The Sword in their own territory.

Pete Sargeant