PRESS
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Orlando Weekly Interview
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Darker glow: An interview with Michael Gira of Swans By Kyle EagleSwans are well into their third decade, with a large discography behind them, but there's a 13-year caesura in there. Led by sole founding member Michael Gira, the band has put out new work every two years since their re-start in 2010, with lots of EPs and fan-favorite sundries in between. The music they've created during this period is some of their most fascinating and vibrant, if not some of the most astounding music around today. (Sadly, Gira has announced elsewhere that The Glowing Man, released June 17, will be the last with this lineup – though he made no direct reference to dissolving the group in our interview with him.)The Glowing Man is no doubt a Swans album imprinted with the DNA of Michael Gira, but with new energy and a mastery of his style – bold, melodic, triumphant, dark and gorgeous. At nearly two hours in length, it sweeps through the listener's imagination like a tempest, balanced with the calm of the eye of the storm. It's a multi-chambered head of music rendered somewhere between the starkness of a Walker Evans photo and the paintings of Robert Williams and......
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Vulture Hound Glowing Man Review
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Swans – The Glowing Man (Album Review) By Toby FountainSwans are one of the last great vanguards of rock music. With vast swathes of the guitar music landscape surrendering to revivalism and outright derivitism, Swans and their new album, The Glowing Man, are a nostalgic reminder of rock’s bolder and more exciting past. We are told by bandleader Michael Gira that this is the final chapter of the bands current incarnation which emerged in 2010 with My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky. The Glowing Man is a poignant summarisation of this period, a collage of the band’s relentlessly experimental and eclectic stylistic journey that has played out over the past six years. At almost two hours in length and boasting three twenty-minute long ‘epics’, the album continues the mammoth approach ofThe Seer and To be Kind but trades much of their tight, rhythmic intensity, for a more hypnotic and even at times delicate approach. But don’t be deceived, none of the band’s classic darkness has receded. Perhaps the most remarkable element of Swans’ songwriting character on this record is the intricate balance of hypnotic beauty and ominous intensity. Throughout the record these two elements are constantly at......
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Glide Glowing Man Review
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SWANS GIVE MUSICAL PROWESS NEW MEANING ON ‘THE GLOWING MAN’ (ALBUM REVIEW)by Marko Polovina 8/10Almost two years since their stellar and critics favorite To Be Kind was released, Swans’ The Glowing Man has the band changing up the pacing a bit; this is a far less challenging 120 minutes and frankly more inviting than they’ve written in quite some time. The opening 13 minutes of “Cloud of Forgetting” isn’t nearly as frenetic in with frontman Michael Gira’s biblical lyricism juxtaposed by piano keys and an always industrial edge at its apex nine minutes into the cries of ‘Take us! Take us! Take us! Save us! Save us! Save us!’ It isn’t the same sinister austere as one could come to expect after the likes of The Seer and To Be Kind. Take in account of its schizophrenic tone of congeniality thatThe Glowing Man rubs along its haphazard key strikes, percussion splashes (shown upon “Cloud of Unknowing”) or the likes of its post-rock ambition that seems well placed effortlessly here and there. It’s difficult to sense a construct behind the curtain, as much of Swans’ musical prowess lies in that very foundation. The Glowing Man is definitely challenging in different ways than......
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Plilly.com Concert Preview
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Michael Gira's Swans flock together but in constant motionMichael Gira has been making gorgeously abrasive music as Swans on and off since 1982, when he was part of New York City's No Wave scene. The brooding singer/composer took a long Swans hiatus after 1996's cinematic Soundtracks for the Blind to start the shimmering, acoustic Angels of Light ensemble. He then shuttered Light and combined the dark Swans' and more sun-dappled Angels' sounds for 2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky and the rebirth of Swans 2.0. Now it's time for another change. "This has been the longest that I have had the same group of Swans," says the deep-voiced Gira, right before the release of The Glowing Man, his band's newest album. "These guys are great. I am continuing onward as Swans, too, after this tour. Just not with the same membership. Or, maybe, some of the same people - who knows? "I think we're exhausted in the sense that we know each other's scent very well. I can't see how to move forward with this same scenario. I just want it to be way more low-key after this." Whatever that means going forward for......
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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,......