PRESS » SWANS
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Record Collector Names 'To Be Kind' the New Album of the Month
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Swans Live Review @ Music Hall of Williamsburg | Brooklyn Vegan
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"As you can see we're playing mostly new songs and really fucked up versions of old songs," said Michael Gira during last night's Music Hall of Williamsburg show (5/19), thesecond of two sold out Swans shows in NYC on their current tour. It was true. You could hardly call this the To Be Kind tour -- those songs were all mostly played on The Seertour -- the only real recognizable parts of that album played were "A Little God In My Hands," "Oxygen" and a small portion of "Bring the Sun." Otherwise the two-hour set included "The Apostate" from the The Seer, and three new songs that appear to (at least tentatively) be titled "Frankie M," "Don't Go" and "Black Hole Man." If it sounds like I'm saying I was disappointed, far from it. It doesn't really matter what Swans' setlist is because every show they put on is a unique, intense experience. When the majority of other bands with classic material dating back to the '80s and '90s (like Swans) get on stage and don't play any of it, there's likely to be some cranky concert goers. But Swans have become a legacy band working entirely on their own terms, far from the type to do a nostalgia tour. And......
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Live Review: Swans at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg | Consequence of Sound
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Music is by definition a physical thing. Of course it is — vibrations and sound waves and the like. That fact will rarely strike you as viscerally as it does at a Swans show. When I last saw the band, at 2013′s Northside Festival, I stood in the photo pit and marveled as I felt the pummeling guitars in my gut, the wind from the amps in my hair. Behind me, veteran fans wielded noise-canceling headphones for comfort. I had none, and had to retreat from the din after an hour or so of the set. This time, a press pass mix-up somewhat mercifully kept me from arriving in time to stand so close. Off to the side, I spent much of the band’s characteristically brutal performance at Music Hall of Williamsburg watching the 60-year-old frontman, noting how his entire body becomes implicated in the sculpting of his increasingly enormous noise compositions. During the climaxes — you know, the pounding, apocalyptic tremors that any 15-minute-or-longer Swans track promises — he would step towards the mic and then lurch back, as if recoiling from the frightful impact of his own yelps. (“G-g-g-get back!” he barked on “The Apostate”, with an echo effect coating his voice.) Sometimes he danced, a flailing, deranged gyration that’s half Thom Yorke motions and half......
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Swans "To Be Kind" Album Review: 10/10 'A Masterpiece' | Louder Than War
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10/10 John Robb reviews the new Swans album and hails it a masterpiece. Swans are a band on a roll. To Be Kind is this years first masterpiece. A stunning, sprawling record that stands tall in a yer surrounded by the yapping mice of attention seeking chancers, a stunning work of art in a gallery of fools and the totem release in a year that’s also full of intriguingly ground breaking records. With this album Swans truly break on through to the other side with a long and intriguing work that combines the beauty and darkness of their best music and somehow makes sense of their command of noise and subtlety. To Be Kind is so many things at once from their neo classical swoops of emotion and imagination and a work that is the closest they have come to making a classic rock record in all the best ways and it really works. If their original eighties albums were powerful for whom the bell tolls works of grinding so called noise their recent records have been adding elements of a musicality to their personal vision to the point where they have now created a record that utilises the classic......
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The Agit Reader | "To Be Kind" Review
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It’s an inevitability that any band that broke up in the ‘90s will reform sooner rather than later. But of all the groups to reunite in recent years, not even the most wide-swinging speculator could have predicted the roar of approval and delight that has greeted Swans’ reformation. From their emergence in the No Wave scene through the 15 years that followed, they were never a band to settle on one sonic style. Besides the use of repetition, they dabbled in a variety of styles and moods. The one thing you could say that was Swans’ signature was the presence of emotionally and sonically brutal songs. Not exactly the soundtrack to swinging Young America. Yet, their return in 2010 was greeted as if they’d spent the better part of the ’90s yucking it up on the couch next to Kennedy. However, their reemergence wasn’t just a one and done victory lap. Instead, they’ve maintained a fairly steady stream of new releases, mixing studio records with live albums. In keeping with that momentum, the band has released its 13th studio album, To Be Kind (Young God). Produced by Swans leader Michael Gira, To Be Kind follows the format of its predecessor, The Seer, as a two-disc......