PRESS
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Metal Hammer Feature
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Electronic Sound Glowing Man Review
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Cleve Scene Glowing Man Review / Show Preview
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Veteran Experimental Rockers Swans Seek to Create a Seductive World of Soundby Eli ShivelyMost professional musicians take their art extremely seriously. It kind of comes with the job. For Michael Gira, however, music acts as more than just an art form — it’s a spiritual catalyst that possesses the power to completely turn one’s mental state on its head. Gira, the 62-year-old creative mastermind and ringleader of the experimental rock group Swans, has devoted his musical career to creating deep and meaningful experiences through both the band’s studio work and their infamously powerful live shows. Preceded by 2012’s The Seer and 2014’s To Be Kind, the group’s latest offering, The Glowing Man, represents the conclusion of a trilogy of sorts — and while it honors the slow burning, groove-oriented structure of those two records, it also expands upon it a bit by bringing a more subdued and down-to-earth vibe. Creating the vast wealth of material that Swans pour into each studio record can often be a tedious process, especially when it’s all so well-orchestrated. Gira is aware that the prospect of even writing songs that often surpass the 20-minute mark sounds crazy, but as maddening as his methods may be......
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The Void Report Glowing Man Review
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ARTIST: SWANS + ALBUM: THE GLOWING MAN + LABEL: YOUNG GOD RECORDS + RELEASED: JUN 17, 2016After the Pixies reunited in 2004, dozens of other 80s-90s era bands have come together for nostalgia tours and, for some, new albums. Most of these reunions have fallen into the category of arguable cash grabs and very few have resulted in an expansion of that bands previous work into new artistic territory. Michael Gira’s Swans fall into the latter category. Spawned from New York’s No Wave scene of the early 1980s, over the next 15-some-odd years the Swans made music critics would call post-punk, industrial, art-rock, and experimental. Resuscitated in 2010, Michael Gira made no attempt to revisit the past. Rather, Gira’s reformed Swans have made some of the best music of their career. Critics have raved over the Swans recent output and The Glowing Man should be no exception. Believing that this current incarnation of the band has accomplished its mission, The Glowing Man marks their final album. Gira will continue under the Swans moniker, but this is the final recording from the lineup who produced the excellent albums My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (2010), The Seer (2012), and To Be Kind (2014). Settle in for......
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Reviler Glowing Man Review
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Review: Swans’ “The Glowing Man” / Show Thur BY JON BEHM The Glowing Man is legendary experimental/post-rock band Swans’ final release under their current lineup, a group that has reinvented and reinvigorated the Swans sound since their reformation in 2010. As far as swan songs go (no pun intended) The Glowing Man is the perfect finishing statement to the era that found frontman Michael Gira pushing the band into a more orchestral direction. Plenty has been made of The Glowing Man’s quietness – but don’t let that fool you. Even at its most sonically docile, The Glowing Man carries a weight of intensity that feels crushing. Perhaps it’s the power of suggestion as much as it is the sound, but even at a whisper Gira is vengeful and terrifying. In “Cloud of Unknowing” he sings “I am watching your skin / your son” in a dirge-like sigh that is all that more effective in its hushed severity than anything that eighties Gira might have screamed. The Glowing Man clocks in at nearly two hours and the intensity never really lets up. It’s like a slow burning anxiety attack that waxes and wanes but never really releases its icy grip from......