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Record Collector Names 'To Be Kind' the New Album of the Month
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Swans Live Review @ Music Hall of Williamsburg | Brooklyn Vegan
"As you can see we're playing mostly new songs and really fucked up versions of old songs," said Michael Gira during last night's Music Hall of Williamsburg show (5/19), thesecond of two sold out Swans shows in NYC on their current tour. It was true. You could hardly call this the To Be Kind tour -- those songs were all mostly played on The Seertour -- the only real recognizable parts of that album played were "A Little God In My Hands," "Oxygen" and a small portion of "Bring the Sun." Otherwise the two-hour set included "The Apostate"... Read more...
Live Review: Swans at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg | Consequence of Sound
Music is by definition a physical thing. Of course it is — vibrations and sound waves and the like. That fact will rarely strike you as viscerally as it does at a Swans show. When I last saw the band, at 2013′s Northside Festival, I stood in the photo pit and marveled as I felt the pummeling guitars in my gut, the wind from the amps in my hair. Behind me, veteran fans wielded noise-canceling headphones for comfort. I had none, and had to retreat from the din after an hour or so of the set. This time, a... Read more...
Swans "To Be Kind" Album Review: 10/10 'A Masterpiece' | Louder Than War
10/10 John Robb reviews the new Swans album and hails it a masterpiece. Swans are a band on a roll. To Be Kind is this years first masterpiece. A stunning, sprawling record that stands tall in a yer surrounded by the yapping mice of attention seeking chancers, a stunning work of art in a gallery of fools and the totem release in a year that’s also full of intriguingly ground breaking records. With this album Swans truly break on through to the other side with a long and intriguing work... Read more...
The Agit Reader | "To Be Kind" Review
It’s an inevitability that any band that broke up in the ‘90s will reform sooner rather than later. But of all the groups to reunite in recent years, not even the most wide-swinging speculator could have predicted the roar of approval and delight that has greeted Swans’ reformation. From their emergence in the No Wave scene through the 15 years that followed, they were never a band to settle on one sonic style. Besides the use of repetition, they dabbled in a variety of styles and moods. The one thing... Read more...
"To Be Kind" Review | NY Times
A crescendo is a simple idea, but if it’s done with a certain amount of integrity, patience and immersive power, it will not fail: It will bring you into a direct power relationship with the music. Swans is interested in crescendos — and in repetitions, and smaller wavelike motions, too: currents of sound and energy that surround listeners and remind them that they are small and insignificant, or perhaps catch them up in its own ambition. There are perhaps things not to like about “To Be Kind,” the band’s new... Read more...
"To Be Kind" Review | Rolling Stone
Experimental rockers Swans have only ever had one goal: to overwhelm. Like their last sonic saga, 2012's The Seer, their latest offers two straight hours of spook-house drones, battering-ram guitar blasts and Michael Gira's howled imperatives about love, sex and death. Songs last up to 34 minutes and alternate between jazzy post-punk ragers ("Oxygen") and trippy jams plucked from the dark side of Pink Floyd ("Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture"). Backup vocals by St. Vincent and Cold Specks provide a stylistic through line back to the shimmery 1996 LP Soundtracks for the Blind, but Gira... Read more...
Swans deliver fearless, fierce and intense 'To Be Kind' | LA Times
Swans' grand new album, "To Be Kind," is a career-defining work that few could have expected from a 30-plus-year project considered by many to be well past its peak. At 122 minutes, it's as long as a movie and as densely heavy as a Richard Serra sculpture. Defying easy categorization, "To Be Kind" is a rock album, but it's not something to be taken lightly. Brash, polarizing, fearless and filled with a purity of vision that would make Col. Kurtz blanch, the work features mountains of guitars and beats made... Read more...
Swans' 'To Be Kind' Is a Monolithic Orgy of Blood, Guts, and…Love | Spin Magazine
Prevailing logic is that the sophomore LP is one of the most daunting challenges of a band’s career. After defining a musical voice with one record that might have taken years of prep, a band is expected to either live up to or outdo that record, and in short order. That said, some records are so big, so impactful, so daunting that they more or less reset the odometer, redefining the expectation cycle in much the same way. Over his roughly 30 years making music with Swans, Michael Gira has released a handful of albums... Read more...
PopMatters | The Knife and the Blood That Ensues: An Interview with Swans
“That sounds dark to you?” Michael Gira asks me as I describe my first time listening to “Screenshot”, the opening cut on the newest Swans LP, To Be Kind. I invoke the adjectives “intense” and “dark” in detailing the eight-minute song’s driving groove in D major. “I must be really fucking sick,” he muses, “because to me that just sounds joyous.” Gira isn’t wrong, of course. All it takes is one glance at any live footage from the Swans tours beginning in 2010 to see that, even when the music reaches pulverizing, heavy climaxes,... Read more...

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