PRESS » Michael Gira
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YOUNG GOD: 10 EARLY SWANS RECORDS YOU NEED TO HEAR (The Vinyl Factory)
() - M. Gira, Michael Gira, SWANS, young god
After blowing us away with 10 slept-on Seattle era grunge records, Nick Soulsby returns with an armful of essential Swans records from their pre-breakup chapter. Words: Nick Soulsby http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-releases/young-god-10-early-swans-records-you-need-to-hear/ Hauled from the grave in 2010, Michael Gira’s resurrected Swans have garnered vast critical and popular respect. Amid a swarm of reformations cashing in nostalgia checks, the band stands near alone with a recent run of albums living up to every inch of their daunting reputation. It wasn’t always the way. Laid to rest in 1998 with the emphatic Swans Are Dead, Gira had concluded Swans’ aura was an albatross to be slain. A tragedy. Swans back catalog offers a depth of lyrical vision, musical innovation and sheer power rarely equaled. Here are ten albums from the first life of Swans that deserve an awed bow of admiration and a few hours of ear-time. As ever we’ve compiled tracks from the records into the playlist below, and scroll down to check out the albums individually. SwansCop(K.422, 1984)Cop is a growling testament to the brutality of Swans’ early vision. Repetitive mantras disguise complex rhythmic patterns underscored Gira’s full-throated declamations of power, surrender, annihilation. These were metal riffs and vocals reduced to the......
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Swans’ Michael Gira: Growing into something new (Whopperjaw)
() - M. Gira, Michael Gira, SWANS, to be kind, young god
Swans‘ frontman Michael Gira originally thought he would be a visual artist. Since childhood, he regularly created illustrations and “devoured books on art.” He even went to art school. It was there that he was introduced to punk rock, which he has said “seemed more relevant and urgent and necessary than forging some kind of art career, which was beginning to look like a parallel career to being a lawyer or accountant.” Initially, he started what he has called a “pretty bad punk rock band” called the Little Cripples that played a show in San Francisco. Shortly after moving to New York in 1979, he launched the oppressively noisy Swans which kept going strong until 1997 when the group disbanded and Gira started up the avant folk act Angels of Light. About five years ago, Gira had some songs for what he presumed would be a new Angels of Light record. In the process of arranging them, he realized they would function better as Swans songs so he re-formed the band and issued My Father Will Guide Me on the Rope to the Sky, what he calls a “transitional album.” In 2103, Swans followed it up with The Seer, an......
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Le National, Montreal QC (Exclaim)
() - M. Gira, Michael Gira, SWANS, to be kind, young god
By Natalie Zina Walschots Published Feb 20, 2015 How the fuck do you talk about Swans? Seriously, someone tell me. I could barely talk at all for a good two hours after the show ended, and not just because, even with very good earplugs, my head was ringing and my hearing was cottony and distant. No. It wasn't that my ears were ringing, though they were. It was that my body was ringing. No other band are capable of generating a full-contact, visceral and aural live experience the way that Swans do. This is not merely a wall of sound, a relentless crush of punishing sonic energy; it is enveloping and immersive, designed to overwhelm but not all at once, a slow drowning in sound that turns the listener's body into a tuning fork. It's odd to feel so smashed, so obliterated and yet be listening so hard, not trying to block out what is already too much, far too much, but to take even more of it in. It's a wonder to realize you can feel your organs against each other, your bones resonant, your teeth vibrating in your gums. It's hard to stay anywhere close to......
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SWANS BRINGS BLISSFUL CACOPHONY TO PORT CITY MUSIC HALL (Maine Today)
() - M. Gira, Michael Gira, SWANS, to be kind, young god
Written by: Robert Ker For a certain segment of the Southern Maine population, the Swans concert at Port City Music Hall on Feb. 17 had been circled on the calendar for some time, and with good reason. Not only are Swans one of the most celebrated cult acts on the rock circuit, but they are also the perfect live act for a city that is lined with crunchy snowbanks, coated in a thick layer of brown sludge and abused by angry, Arctic winds. The people of Portland have had enough of all of this, and Swans makes music for people who have had enough. They come billed loosely as “metal” or “noise rock,” but they contain neither the full-throttle adrenaline that the former often implies nor the abrasiveness that the latter does. Instead, they offer melodic, droning passages that stretch for miles, frequently involve chanting, and can slowly crescendo into majestic waves. One would almost call it peaceful if it wasn’t loud enough to register on the Richter scale. The set offered few of these songs, but there was a lot of meat on those bones. Several compositions pushed up against the 20-minute mark, with long introductions in which a......
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Swans, Chelsea Wolfe @ Warsaw, Brooklyn (Stereogum)
() - M. Gira, Michael Gira, SWANS, to be kind, young god
By Doug Moore / June 14, 2013 - 4:26 pm Michael Gira prefers to call the version of Swans that emerged in early 2010 a reconstitution rather than a reunion. It is easy to see why the word choice matters to him; the term “reunion” comes with a great deal of historical baggage that simply does not apply to the band’s current iteration. They have been very busy, but not with nostalgia — only one pre-hiatus song regularly appears in their set list. Instead, they have gone on a creative tear, releasing two new albums that stand tall among one of the starkest and most powerful catalogs in rock music. (If you have somehow avoided Swans so far, you owe it to yourself to check out Aaron Lariviere’s excellent Counting Down feature on the band. I am still mad at him for his placement of Filth, Cop, and My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, though.) Swans have toured heavily since their reemergence, and live performance is important to their experimental process. Their new material is only loosely structured and relies heavily on interpretation and improvisation. During the tour that led up to the recording of......