PRESS
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Outloud Glowing Man Review
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Review: Swans – The Glowing ManBy Andy GarciaTo get a human into a trance state isn’t an easy task; hypnotization or some other form of stimuli is needed. Midway through Swans’ latest and final effort The Glowing Man, I caught myself slipping and dissociating from some of my senses, due to the rhythmic churning of guitars and crashing cymbals on track “Frankie M”. “Break a glass, stab his eye, choke his neck, nothing’s left.” The track’s violent thrashing culminated in this verse that was as disparate as the music itself. Michael Gira, lead singer and guitarist of the band, founded Swans in 1982 in the midst of New York’s booming No Wave scene. The term “No Wave” was first coined in NYC as a rejection to the current sounds of New Wave, which were popular during the late 1970s and ‘80s. Dissonance and noise were key factors in the sound of No Wave, reflected in Swans’ earlier and current work. “Cloud of Forgetting” opens the album with swirling organs and the light strumming of an acoustic guitar. The tension already starts to build as instruments glide against each other, with bass and drums giving the track it’s structure. Gira chants, “walking,......
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XFRD Glowing Man Review
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THE GLOWING MAN by SwansBY ALEXANDER LARIOS · JULY 1, 2016 Genre: Post-Rock Favorite Tracks: “Cloud of Unknowing,” “The World Looks Red / The World Looks Black,” “When Will I Return?,” “The Glowing Man,” “Finally, Peace” Whenever a Swans album comes out, it always proves itself to be a profoundly interesting trek into the dark recesses of frontman Michael Gira’s broken psyche. Whether it be guys with toothy FILTH shirts at music stores or blog-worthy epiphanies after finishing up the second disc of SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND, Swans and Gira have been familiar names in experimental post-rock for a good while now. Since the 80s Sonic Youth tour, Swans didn’t have a problem venturing away from the accessible and towards the aggressively bizarre fueled by Gira’s tumultuous past. When resuscitating Swans in 2010 after its supposed 1997 disbanding, many heard a more refined Gira coming back from his Angels of Light side project. The albums to follow were amazingly produced and still kept the dreadful intensity that made Swans much more than just 90s noise. Most of the time, Gira hits it right on the mark for awe-struck critics and fans alike without a hitch. Even Angels of Light’s releases......
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Medium The Glowing Man Review
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Album Review: “The Glowing Man” by SwansDavid Bradford There’s no way to predict what path Michael Gira will take Swans down next. From the industrial rock inception of the legendary New York-based experimental rock kings in the early 1980’s to the group’s then-magnum opus “Soundtracks for the Blind” in 1996 to the subsequent hiatus beginning in 1997, Gira has always guided the group down an assortment of musical paths that keep the group’s material exciting and fresh. With their latest release — “The Glowing Man”, the band’s fourteenth studio album — the band’s current lineup has reached its end, leaving Gira with the opportunity to carry on Swans’ undeniable legacy with an assortment of collaborators and a seemingly never-ending creative mind. The current lineup revived Swans from the dead in 2010 and with the release of “The Seer” in 2012 they began dabbling with a musical formula that they’ve perfected. The formula is simple: a succinct groove tightly played as added bits of instrumentation meticulously chime in and progress in intensity and volume until they transform into herculean walls of noise that become so brutal that they self-destruct into battered pieces and the listener’s mind is nothing but a scrambled pot of stew. A......
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Ear Buddy Glowing Man Review
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Swans – The Glowing Man Roundtable ReviewSwans gave us 2014's best album. Does The Glowing Man shine just as bright? 8.2 / 10Welcome to another Earbuddy Roundtable Review. To explain, Earbuddy assembles three or more writers to discuss a new album with each writer giving his/her thoughts on the release and their own personal score. Then an average score is determined for the album overall. For our latest Roundtable, Earbuddy writers Tom Alexander, JEDowney, NK, and Aaron Kolarcik will be reviewing Swans’ The Glowing Man. Album Background 2014 was a year where most of the Earbuddy staff was divided by two albums — Sun Kil Moon’s Benji andSwans’ To Be Kind. To Be Kind took the top honor as album of the year and still holds up as a complex, bold listen. You pretty much have to make time for To Be Kind if you want to explore it once again, but it pays off in dividends. No surprise then that the Earbuddy staff would get together for a Roundtable review of Swans’ latest LONG, long-player The Glowing Man, which marks the end in a trilogy beginning with The Seer and followed byTo Be Kind. Swans’ leader Michael Gira has......
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Louder Than War Glowing Man Review
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Swans : ‘Glowing Man’ : album reviewWritten by johnrobb5 July, 2016SwansThe Glowing Man10/10album review Yet again Swans make another powerful hypnotic album that is as terrifying as it is beautiful as it concerns itself with the powerful intoxicant of love and all the highs and lows that entails says LTW boss and Membranes frontman John Robb So, all good things come to the end. Where Swans go from here no-one can really speculate but there is an end here. A real sense of finality. This is a juddering and enormous full stop to this incredible four album journey that began with My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky in 2010 and saw the return of Swans as purveyors of a rock music at the final furthest edge of the universe. Each album was a huge work to get lost in and each album dared to go further into a heart of darkness. The Glowing Man ebbs and flows and has some of the familiar hallmarks of this period of Swans like the swelling guitar dissonance, the almost classic, brooding, sinister swells of sound like on the 25-minute Cloud Of Unknowing. Some of those hallmarks of their......