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Scene Point Blank Interview with Michael Gira
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
Swans are an evergreen, diverse band. In the 1980s they created brutal industrial rock, attracting fans ranging from heavy metal bros to friggin’ Kurt Cobain (he listed 1984’sYoung God EP as one of his all-time favorite albums). They shifted towards ambient with 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind; Terrorizer’s Nick Terry gave it five stars, simply calling it “fucking awesome.” 16 years later, Swans were obliterated with praise. Their grand 2012 album The Seer garnered a 9.0 at Scene Point Blank, and was called one of the top 10 albums of the year by many music outlets. After all the unstoppable acclaim caused by The Seer, the New York avant-garde ensemble are back again with To Be Kind. It’s two hours of raw, fierce Swans beauty. With guest spots from St. Vincent, Little Annie, and Cold Specks, the new album drops on May 13. Check out Scene Point Blank’s recent interview with Swans’ head muchacho Michael Gira: Scene Point Blank: Since Swans’ regrouping in 2010, you’ve released My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, The Seer, and To Be Kind. The latter two are around two hours long and both are 2-disc sets. Additionally, “Bringing the Sun”/”Toussaint L’Overture” is the fourth track on To Be Kind and just over a half-hour......
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"To Be Kind" Review | Stereogum
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Have you ever heard voices? The sound of people echoing around in your head, unsettling you deeply, even when you know they’re not real? I have. Only a couple of times. Didn’t last long. I was at the library near my house one day once, maybe nine years old, spending hours paging through old movie reference books because I was a weird kid, almost falling asleep, when I heard my mom’s voice. She wasn’t talking, exactly. Or maybe she was. I could definitely hear my name a few times, but everything else was a damp echoing blur. It was like she was multitracked, layers of shards of words coming at me from every direction, never adding up to something I could interpret. She sounded pissed at me; I knew that much. But I couldn’t piece together why. And it wasn’t really her, anyway. It was my brain, fucking with me. It terrified me. Today, decades later, I think about that moment and my blood runs cold. The reason I’m bringing it up is that there’s a moment maybe eight minutes into “Just A Little Boy (For Chester Burnett),” the second song on the new Swans album To Be Kind, that brings me back, viscerally, to......
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NPR First Listen | "To Be Kind"
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Only on occasion does it make sense to praise music as scary, and somehow many of those occasions coincide with Swans sending new sounds out into the world. Since 1982, when the band emerged from the same New York "no wave" scene as noise-rock acts like Sonic Youth, Swans' seething intensity has been a default mode. Every element of the Swans sound is alarming, brutal, dark and sublimely beautiful for all the rage that gets articulated — and the sense of release that gets promised, too. After a fateful demise in the '90s (see the live-recorded, um, swan songSwans Are Dead) and a resurrection in 2010, the group has been on an improbable hot streak ever since, culminating with 2012's The Seer and a traveling road show that threatened to tear apart the fabric of the cosmos every time Michael Gira and his collaborators took the stage. To Be Kind, fans of aural menace will be pleased to know, follows suit. "Screenshot" opens on a telltale skulking, stalking note, with repetitive curls of guitar and bass that make for a cruel kind of disembodied funk doled out in slow motion. Gira's vocals occupy a style somewhere between a whisper and a growl, and......
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Kerrang! Magazine | "To Be Kind"
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The Line of Best Fit, Album of the Week: "To Be Kind"
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You’ve probably seen them; they’re everywhere these days: pictures of nice pleasant beaches, gently undulating hills, or soft dappled light flowing through breaks in a woodland canopy, all accompanied by some godawful pious quote about the singular importance of kindness. They spread through the internet like an outbreak of cholera. Kurt Vonnegut: ‘There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ Henry James: ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.’ There’s always something unendurably smug about these homilies on kindness, something important that’s lacking in a view of the world in which the most important thing is a duty of vague pleasantness. As it turns out, what’s been missing all this time is a two-hour double album of thunderous, stomping noise. And out of the kindness of their hearts, that’s exactly whatSwans have given us. Musically, To Be Kind doesn’t offer an enormous deal of innovation on its predecessor – but when that predecessor is 2012’s sprawling epic masterpiece The Seer, that’s hardly a bad thing. To Be Kind progresses through long, winding drones and tiny tight riffs,......