PRESS » SWANS
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Pitchfork "To Be Kind": Best New Music
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Swans were hardly the first 1980s underground-rock fixtures to resurface in the new millennium, and they’re not the only ones who've resisted the nostalgic trappings of reunion tours to make a respectable showing as a rebooted recording act. But they are the rare band of their vintage who seem less concerned with living up to or building upon a past legacy than establishing a completely different one. In retrospect, the 14 years that elapsed between 1996’sSoundtracks for the Blind and 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky were less a break-up-induced hiatus than a gestation period. The bigger, brawnier Swans that Michael Gira has assembled in its wake (complete with a strapping, bare-chested gong-smasher named Thor) are beholden neither to the primordial, industrialized sludge of the band’s infamous ’80s catalogue nor the post-goth serenity of their ’90s work. Instead, they’ve perfected a new means of transforming grostequerie into grandeur and vice versa. With 2012’s astonishingly colossal The Seer, Swans pulled off the unlikeliest of coups: A record that, over its six sides and two-hour-plus running time, was seemingly designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet, amazingly, expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. (This summer, Swans are even playing the......
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"Swans’ Michael Gira is Searching for God" | Wondering Sound Interview
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
When Swans emerged from the white heat of New York’s no wave scene 32 years ago, they sounded like nothing else. There were fellow travelers — groups like Sonic Youth and Mars, or contemporary composers like Glenn Branca — who shared their passion for dense, layered sound and extreme, ecstatic volume. But Swans’ leader Michael Gira was his own beast. By day a construction worker hauling concrete and girders, at night he turned into a sort of mad monk, taking the stage barefoot, tearing at his clothing and laying himself supplicant in worship before Swans’ immense slabs of noise. But if Swans were one of a kind, they were also a band compelled by the urge to evolve. With the help of long-term collaborator and sometime-partner Jarboe, who joined the band in 1986, Gira opened up Swans to the influence of folk, neo-classical and soundtrack music, with 1996′s Soundtracks for the Blind, prefiguring the apocalyptic post-rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Swans dissolved shortly after Soundtracks, with Gira turning attention to his acoustic project Angels of Light and his label Young God, which released early records by Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family. In 2010, though, following a 14-year hiatus, Gira announced that Swans were again......
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eMusic "To Be Kind" Review
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Charging ahead for two-plus hours with no apologies or concessions For nearly two hours, To Be Kind — the third album since 2010 from the reconstituted epic aggression syndicate, Swans — tests its audience’s limits by pressing its own boundaries. There is the Pentecostal burn of opener “Screenshot,” in which Michael Gira snaps out a series of edicts — “No need! No hate! No will! No speech!” — as though infractions are punishable by torture. The drums of “Oxygen” push like heavy fists through sheets of distortion and dissonance. During the 34-minute “Bring the Sun,” Gira intones in the manner of a Tuvan throat singer over field recordings of neighing horses before shouting, in Spanish, “Blood is life…Blood is love” amid the tumult of a self-destructing free-jazz ensemble. Even mid-record comedown “Some Things We Do” unravels into a nightmare, its motion-sick string section trailing Gira’s duet with veteran iconoclast Little Annie, a stalker on the trail. But just as the album starts to cross that two-hour mark, the 10th and final track, “To Be Kind,” extends some relief, with halting acoustic guitar and a choir that seems to float in from another room. But the sudden composure is a feint, giving way......
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Crack Magazine Swans Feature | Interview with Michael Gira
() - Michael Gira, SWANS
“INTOLERANT, UNCOMPROMISING AND WEARISOME” – SWANS’ MICHAEL GIRA ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL THE MAELSTROM “I’m on a cliff that is crumbling”, a dogged voice recounts from an earlier conversation. “You have to hang on as long as you can.” The doleful croak trails to crisp silence until a gentle resemblance to laughter recoils around the room. Michael Gira, world-weary impetus behind Swans, may not have the most sanguine of mindsets, but the gristly wit is instantly discernible. As adverse and cankerous as this multifaceted musician is penned to be, it’s within this momentary aside that Gira becomes the distant humorist. Physically wrecked from incalculable tour dates and the impending release of their 13th studio album, To Be Kind, he’s still laughing – despite how fearsome it sounds. Two years in the wake of The Seer, a monolithic sprawl of a record, Gira and his amassed gathering of instrumentalists are rehearsing set ideas for their upcoming tour. “I actually managed to listen through The Seer recently”, Gira gingerly reveals, “I was thinking about what to do on the next tour in terms of soundscapes. I like doing that, but I’m glad that we’re leaving that behind and moving more towards evidence of the band playing. This......
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Clash Magazine Essential Albums | Swans "To Be Kind"
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