PRESS
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NY Daily News concert review
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Swans slays at final Music Hall of Williamsburg show with its current commanding lineupBy Amy RoweSwans graced a sold-out audience at Music Hall of Williamsburg Saturday during the final tour with its current bevy of musicians, led by the always entrancing creator and frontman Michael Gira. The New York outfit’s performance, in support of “The Glowing Man” released in June, reached insane levels of volume that have come to be expected at the noise rock group’s live shows since its formation in the 1980s. With earplugs a near necessity, the band entranced the audience for two hours, the sheer skill of each of its players on display the entire time. Gira is a centrifugal force. The guitarist, singer and songwriter is the captain of the ship. Each of the overwhelmingly talented musicians accompanying him on stage (that's Christopher Pradvica on bass, Norman Westberg on guitar, Christoph Hahn on guitar/lap steel guitar and Phil Puleo on drums) took cues from the dark, cunning conductor. Conspicuously absent was Thor Harris, their formidable percussionist and xylophone/vibes player. The set opened with “The Knot,” an amalgamation of their 2010 song “No Words/No Thoughts” with what sounded like new material. The band slowly built up......
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Pop Matters Feature
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Michael Gira Talks Swans' Creative Processby Jedd Beaudoin The 14 albums Michael Gira has made with Swans since 1982 provide glimpses of a seeker, an artist adding and subtracting elements to and from a larger vision that comes in brilliant flashes of light, then emerges later as something almost wholly unexpected. The music heard on The Glowing Man, the latest Swans LP, serves as a fine example of this intensity. The tracks that open the record, “Cloud of Forgetting” and “Cloud of Unknowing”, form a tight, 37-minute bond with the listener. Elements of the experimental, post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd and other assorted psychedelic delights reveal themselves across the former’s comparatively slender 12 minutes. Along the way, there are touches of minimalism as channeled through the spirit of Howlin’ Wolf, doses of jazz and a wicked, haunted yawp that transcends the human voice. It is unexpectedly spiritual and awe-inspiring, like standing in a medieval cathedral, aware that what ultimately endures isn’t us. The latter piece is a clattering, clawing, cathartic and dramatic work, confrontational yet meditative, wholly miraculous, sure-footed, appealing and enigmatic, relentless and shocking in ways that even the most avant-garde-leaning rock music rarely dares to be. One is reluctant to......
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MONDO SONORO Cover Feature
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Feature in Polityka
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Noise Cover
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