PRESS » SWANS
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The Quietus Album Review | Swans "To Be Kind"
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The Arts Desk Album Review | Swans "To Be Kind"
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Compelling career best from Michael Gira's veterans. Anyone who is unfamiliar with Swans might reasonably assume that these veterans of New York’s early eighties “noise” scene to be well past their best by now. As powerful as Black Sabbath on steroids, Swans’ music has taken in industrial noise, art rock, gothic country and, since reforming as a going concern in 2010, brooding, apocalyptic mini-symphonies. To Be Kind is their 13th studio album, the band has been around (on and off and in various incarnations) for more than 30 years and, singer and bandleader, Michael Gira won’t be seeing his 60th birthday again. However, such an assumption would be wrong. To Be Kind is the sound of a beautiful, primeval chaos that taps directly into the root without any unnecessary artifice and could quite conceivably be their best album to date. This is all the more incredible, given that it is over two hours long and spread over two CDs. In fact, to label To Be Kind merely as rock music would be doing the album a disservice, for it has as much in common with the orchestral pagan ritual of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as it does with “Jailhouse Rock”. While To Be Kind takes its queues from Swans’......
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NME Album Of The Week | Swans "To Be Kind"
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Swans "To Be Kind" | Drowned In Sound
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To say that Swans have had a successful comeback would be the mother of all understatements. When Michael Gira reactivated the band in 2010, only the most hopeful of aficionados would have expected anything even vaguely comparable to the greatest moments of their original incarnation (1987’sChildren of God and 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind). The comeback record,My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was somewhat understated, although not a disappointment, but 2012’s staggering The Seerwas not only easily the equal of its illustrious forebears, it won Swans an impressive array of new followers in the process. Swans are now bigger, and perhaps better, than ever before. This means that more listeners than ever can bask in the glory that is To Be Kind, the thirteenth Swans studio record, and their third double set. A two-hour odyssey of similar proportions to The Seer, this is an album that emphasises rather than establishes Swans' reconfirmed position at the top of the experimental rock tree, but that doesn’t make it any less of a thrill. The ten tracks collected here, ranging from five to 34 minutes in length, demonstrate everything that Swans have ever been over their career, but it is their bloody mindedness that continues to......
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HOW GIRA GOT HIS GROOVE BACK: THE SWANS FRONTMAN ON KLIMT, KUTI AND TANTRIC SEX
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It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say that, at its peak, ‘Bring The Sun / Toussaint L’Ouverture’ – the opus at the centre of Swans’ latest album To Be Kind - sounds like the heavens being ripped open. Then again, the aim of Swans’ music has never been mere sonic affect, but shared sublime experience. Steering the band towards that common goal is the visionary Michael Gira. On stage, he contorts and flails, guiding the band like a possessed conductor, and it’s easy to imagine him acting similarly in the studio, sculpting chaos into complex narratives. Indeed, when discussing how many of the songs on To Be Kind were written during an intensive touring period, Gira explains, “The music developed organically, with me generally acting as the director and trying to get the music to take on a life of its own.” That life of its own, the beating heart that makes To Be Kind so powerful, like The Seer in 2012 and My Father Will Guide Me Up By A Rope To The Sky in 2010, is tricky to pin down. Rather than the sheer brute force of earlier Swans albums such as Young God, dialectical oppositions dominate To Be Kind: control and chaos; violence and calm; bleakness and exaltation; density and space. It’s every......