Send "Swans " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Swans debuted in the early 1980s with the starkest and ugliest music imaginable: Nerve-shreddingly slow and plug-your-ears loud, somewhere between no wave and doom metal, with lyrics that viewed humanity as a sheep-like mass that deserved whatever horror came its way. Melody, nuance, and gentleness came later, but by then it was too late. Swans' rep as unrepentant industrial brutalists had stuck. Sure, it was unfair, but that's what happens when you introduce yourself with a sound that singular and abrasive.Swans frontman/mastermind Michael Gira was notoriously unhappy about that rep. His early records made their point-- music can sometimes hurt, and sometimes that hurt is weirdly pleasurable-- and by the late 80s his interests lay elsewhere. Sure his lyrics remained oppressive, abject, and generally icky, but his bellowing and moaning became a mournful croon. Humanity and beauty kept leaking in, almost despite the band's best intentions. As the 90s went on, Swans albums became as much about exploring gorgeous (if disquieting) ambient texture as crushing heads. Gira's songs blossomed from skeletal rhythmic sketches into lush epics that predicted a lot of post-rock. But Swans' music, whatever the period, was driven by a philosophy of no compromises. Gira wanted the freedom to change direction whenever he wished. Swans fans and critics refused to shut up about his earlier, more brutal records, as if Gira were Woody Allen raised on Marquis de Sade. So he did the only reasonable thing an intractable man could do: He killed the band in 1997, dumped its historical baggage, and tried to enjoy the freedom of no expectations in a new project, Angels of Light....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| The first Swans album in 13 years opens with church bells. They’re the kind of bells you don’t hear too much in suburban America anymore — the kind that don’t ring, but toll. Maybe the bells are gone because all the churches are in strip malls or on giant campuses too far from anywhere to be heard. Or maybe, as Michael Gira seems convinced, they’re gone because if we listened to those bells, and to all the other parts of the past we’ve conveniently forgotten, we wouldn’t like what they remind us of. My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky, from the title’s evocation of righteous death on down to its suffusion with keening strings and other touches of sonic Americana, is an attempt to come to terms with the dark heart of history, with that ultimate question: if we are born into crime and monstrous darkness, how do we become more than that past? Those church bells are the kind that tolled over Salem as teenage girls were being burned, and the doleful brass and drum rolls that pepper the album saw young boys into the killing fields of Antietam. This is a record obsessed with children and parents and legacy, in a way that’s unsurprisingly grim. “I love you, young flower/ Now give me what is mine,” guest Devendra Banhart coos with vampiric anticipation, echoed by affectless innocents. “Mother I need you/ I need your claws in my neck,” Gira demands, for maybe there are no innocents in all of this. And maybe there were never even the good intentions we always speak of going astray: “Please never forgive me/ Please spit on my name/ But hold on to my memory, and keep me to blame.” Isn’t it easier, somehow, to imagine our children will remember us in infamy, than memorialize our greatness? What matters to we venal mortals, anyway, is to never die. “Long may he live, long may he live/ Long may his children drift through the wind/ To think is a sin, to think is a sin/ Long may his world... never begin.” I’m not quite sure I’ve got that right; is it his world or his woes that are never to begin? Is this a blessing or a curse? Gira mocks our lust for immortality and all the ways we have contrived to chase it. “Ride your mechanical beast to heaven,” he commands, sneering at techno-lust, as well as at his most consistent target, religion. Sometimes his curses against heaven and hell are oblique: “Let’s strangle the man and the tower of stairs/ Let’s piss on the sea that’s burning down there.” Sometimes he is more direct, and it’s in those moments that the record borders on self-righteous nihilism. When Gira demands that we “burn up the liar pile” or declares that he is “free of the choking hold that began in Eden Prison,” we glimpse the Holden Caufield callowness of his punk roots....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| A brief overview: Michael Gira is the colorfully damaged, enviably fearless guy who started an earlier incarnation of Swans in the boiler room of early ‘80s New York, as a monotonous, relentlessly negative… “industrial” doesn’t really work here. Think slo-mo brutality in 2/4, with no real stake in society at large. Over time, particularly when he brought in the ultra-girly drama-club influence of singer Jarboe, Swans became something much more complex. Along with Gira’s scary cult-leader charisma and the grinding, sadistic rhythm section, albums such as Love of Life, White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and The Burning World (a simplified, Cohen-biting bid for college radio airplay that’s weathered surprisingly well) brought in symphonic complexity and moments of gorgeous emotional depth. Catharsis via extreme contrast. More recently, Gira’s records as Angels of Light (with or without Akron/Family, which, let it be known, is a completely different band when Gira is in the room) have mined American folk music, with often transcendent, sometimes disappointingly “mature” results. It’s always a bitch to write about a musician who writes about his own music so obsessively and entertainingly. (David Thomas is another one of those.) In his effusive mailing-list updates, MG has made it clear that this is “not a reunion.” K. But I’ll observe that My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky distills everything Gira has ever done. It’s a shockingly dense record, the Gira experience in 45 minutes or less. All killer, no filler, for real....full text |
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