PRESS » SWANS
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Music OHM | Swans "To Be Kind" Review
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Rarely, if ever, is a band afforded as much praise, opinion, reverence – and time – as M. Gira’s Swans. Praise because more often than not they deserve it; opinion because more often than not different people hear different things in the music; reverence because there’s a significant lack of bands with such a monstrous catalogue (possibly only Nick Cave trumps Gira’s band in hit-to-miss ratio); time because, well, their last two records have – for better or worse – seemed to go on for an age. At some point when you’re listening to To Be Kind, you have to stop. You have to take a break. It is simply impossible to listen to the entire thing in one go. In the two hours that To Be Kind occupies, you could listen to the first three Stooges albums and still have 15 minutes spare (there’s a track on To Be Kind that is longer than the entirety of Raw Power – that’s not even a lie). You could listen to the first Swans record three times in two hours. Hell, the last album you listened to that even came close to two hours was probably The Seer, unless you’re into prog-rock. The question is, is it......
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Time Out London | "To Be Kind" Review
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The New York noise veterans have created an awe-inspiring monster of a triple album – again When apocalyptic alt rock warriors Swans toured around the release of 2012’s monolithic triple album ‘The Seer’, one might conceivably have expected them to play a bunch of tracks from 2012’s monolithic triple album ‘The Seer’.But such petty concerns as ‘promotion’ do not bother band lynchpin Michael Gira, a granite crag of a man who gives every impression that he was in this world before the dawn of history and will continue playing thunderously upsetting rock right until the point the sun explodes, and probably after.It is very easy to get carried away when writing about Swans – their music isn’t so much unrecognisably ‘other’ as recognisable rock music blown up to an almost unimaginable scale. For instance: ‘To Be Kind’, the album from which Swans mostly played while touring ‘The Seer’, is ten tracks and 121 minutes long. Gira has commented that MP3 is the best format to listen to it on because it gives no pause or respite.Where ‘The Seer’ was a rich, organic work that explored the breadth of Swans’s sound, ‘To Be Kind’ is almost monomaniacal in its focus on......
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The 405 "To Be Kind" Review
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Taken at face value, you probably have to assume that the name Swans was chosen at least as a non-sequitur and likely, more deliberately, as an ironic counterpoint to the racket that Michael Gira's men actually made. How poignant, then, that it would actually come to evince some genuine validity in the band's later years; their 'reactivation' - Gira doesn't like the connotations of the word 'reunion' - has seen them carry themselves with such grace, such elegance, that you wonder why anybody guilty of resurrecting their old outfit purely for financial reasons doesn't simply melt with shame at the mention of Swans' name. It seems bizarre to put it this way, but The Seer, which ran two hours and, as always, carried an aggressively experimental edge, was probably Swans' most accessible work. It certainly carried their appeal beyond the core fanbase that was delighted to hear news of their return four years ago, and perhaps that's why there isn't too much of an effort to diverge from that basic formula on To Be Kind. Any record on which the eight-minute opening track - in this case, 'Screen Shot' - feels like mere preamble is obviously going to carry with it a certain level......
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Guardian Guide | Swans Feature
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The Times Essential Tracks | Swans "A Little God In My Hands"
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