PRESS
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OBSERVER INTERVIEW
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Michael Gira on ‘Dangling Off the Edge of a Cliff’ for Swans’ Epic Final AlbumBy Jordan N. Mamonehttp://observer.com/2016/07/michael-gira-on-dangling-off-the-edge-of-a-cliff-for-swans-epic-final-album/ Swans leader Michael Gira is awake and affable at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. His alertness at such an ungodly hour may initially seem contrary to his group’s dark, foreboding image, but it actually squares perfectly with the singer’s Stakhanovite work ethic. (Never mind that he’s also the father of a pair of young children.) Born in 1982, broken up by 1997, and revived in 2010, Swans subsequently began attracting their largest audiences yet thanks to marathon world tours, symphony-length shows played at concussive volume and a total disregard for both commercial niceties and bankable nostalgia. Every public performance is an awe-inspiring spectacle of art and exertion. Dual drummers hammer away at gongs and dulcimers, Christoph Hahn’s modified lap-steel guitar whinnies like a spinning drill bit, and Gira alternately commands and submits to the resulting tidal wave of sound, bellowing in the baritone of a wrathful lord then spastically slapping himself in the face. Released June 17, The Glowing Man is the third consecutive Swans album—each issued as a mammoth triple-LP set—to synthesize all of the band’s stylistic quirks. The car-crushing riffs and slow-motion rhythms from the group’s earliest......
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Contact Music Glowing Man Review
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Review of The Glowing Man Album by SwansBy Max CussonsExtraordinaryhttp://www.contactmusic.com/swans/music/swans-the-glowing-man-album-review Where to begin when talking about Swans? This is the band with arguably the richest history in experimental music. For starters there's their significance to ugly no-wave and noise rock in the eighties, with their first run of albums, then their evolution into more ethereal music which led up to their tenth and final album before initially breaking up, 1996's 'Soundtracks For The Blind' an album about two and a half hours long which included soaring post-rock, animalistic noisy numbers as well as twisted exercises in the sinister thanks to an eerie use of sampling and the record is widely considered a masterpiece in the strange.However, when Swans got back together in 2010 it was more than just a reunion, it was a rebirth. A new era for the band which has seen them put out some of the strongest material of their legacy, most notably 2014's 'To Be Kind' a two-hour long epic which balanced their freakiness with solid, captivating groove and arguably dethroned 'Soundtracks For The Blind as Swans' magnum opus. They're back with newest release 'The Glowing Man' which sees Swans continue to be mesmerising with their......
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The Week Glowing Man Review
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How Swans became modern rock's greatest re-invention taleGreg Cwikhttp://theweek.com/articles/631011/how-swans-became-modern-rocks-greatest-reinvention-tale Listening to Swans is a total-body experience that borders on being an out-of-body experience. You feel the music envelope you, as if drowning in the writhing sea of noise that seeps out of the wunderkammer consciousness of mad genius Michael Gira. The music washes over you, permeates you, seduces you, and abuses you. It's histrionic and huge and relentless, but can be intimate — savagely intimate. No rock band in recent memory has so deeply tapped into the existential ache of being alive. Swans had a prodigious 14-year first phase, releasing 10 albums between 1982 and 1996. (The band went belly-up while Gira decided to focus on his folkier project, Angels of Light.) But Swans' final album of this period, the live LP Swans Are Dead, proved to be as misleading as any horror movie that contains the words "Final" or "Is Dead" in the title. Gira exhumed and reanimated the squalid no-wave band as an experimental drone-rock outfit in 2010, releasing My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky. At a comparatively slender 44 minutes, the album feels like a prelude to The Seer (2012), an aphotic,......
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Pretty Much Amazing Glowing Man Review
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Review: Swans, The Glowing ManThe Glowing Man is the best sendoff the band could have possibly given themselvesLUKE FOWLER JUN 23, 2016http://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews/swans-glowing-man "Usually—I have no other way to describe it—I’m in a sort of vacant state, fooling around on my guitar, and suddenly images start flowing through me. It starts with a phrase or two, then just grows like kudzu on a tree, feeding on hapless me, the unwitting host. I’ve used the conceit of calling the person or entity that inhabits me at these moments Joseph—even wrote a song for him on the record—but in truth I don’t understand the process at all. I’m more than a little frightened of it, actually, and don’t really want to know what goes on there.” — Michael Gira, 2007 So that’s it, then. Six years, four studio albums, and Swans are back to the same place they were after Soundtracks for the Blind, a band in a limbo state, finished with their latest “configuration.” They aren’t dead, as their 1998 live album prematurely professed in its title, but the band as we’ve known them since 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky is finished. It’s a bittersweet......
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Gig Soup Glowing Man Review
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Swans ‘The Glowing Man’ – ALBUM REVIEWby Daniel Kirbyhttp://www.gigsoup.co.uk/reviews/album-reviews/editing-swans-glowing-man-album-review/ One of the most challenging bands of the past 35 years, Swans emerged out of New York’s no wave scene in the early 1980’s alongside the likes of Sonic Youth. Revolving around the uncompromisingMichael Gira, their early material was a terrifyingly nihilistic and aggressive blend of industrial and noise rock played live at vomit inducing volumes. The influence of Gira’s then partner Jarboewould gradually lead in the toning down of Swans sound to include various forms of experimental rock, folk and later electronics, with decision to dissolve the band coming while they were at their peak in 1997. After a decade of leading the folk-driven Angels of Light, Gira decided it was time to bring Swans back to life. On the three albums since their return in 2010, the second incarnation of the band has gone from strength to strength. 2012’s ‘The Seer’ and 2014’s ‘To Be Kind’ being among their greatest releases, showing them to be masters of building tension using repetition in creative and complex ways. The third-part in a trilogy of double albums spanning two hours, ‘The Glowing Man’ brings to a close another chapter, with Gira planning to disband the current line-up after just six years together in order to “shake things up” with a “revolving cast of collaborators“. ‘The Glowing Man’ is as ambitious and intense as......