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All Music Glowing Man Review
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Swans - The Glowing Manby Paul Simpson http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-glowing-man-mw0002937549 Following the unprecedented critical and commercial success of Swans' double-album masterworksThe Seer and To Be Kind -- the latter of which reached the Top 40 of both the U.S. and U.K. album charts -- Michael Gira announced that the existing iteration of the band would only produce one more album and tour. The Glowing Man, as with its predecessors, is a sprawling two-hour epic containing lengthy compositions that the band developed during their momentous tours (and documented their progress on limited double-CDs released on their website in order to raise funds for the proper albums).The Glowing Man contains fewer tracks than the group's previous albums (only eight this time around), and most of them are well over ten minutes each. This looks daunting on paper, but it doesn't seem indulgent at all to anyone who has witnessed the group's performances, which are moving experiences for the musicians and audience members alike. Gira is less a songwriter than a summoner, channeling unspeakable amounts of energy into ritualistic spectacles. Many of the songs start out with tension-building drones, often utilizing lots of percussion (and Okkyung Lee's furious cello freakery on "Cloud of Unknowing") before......
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Vanity Fair M. Gira Interview
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Swans’ Michael Gira On Dissolving His Band’s Current Lineup The architect of the notoriously loud band’s sound discusses its current cast’s final record out this week. BY SPIKE CARTERhttp://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/06/swans-michael-gira-on-dissolving-his-bands-current-lineup In 2009, Michael Gira decided to breathe new life into his band Swans. Originally critic-dubbed “art-rock” contemporaries of Sonic Youth in the early 80s, the band underwent several aesthetic cycles with a rotating cast of characters, all while remaining ranked as one of music’s loudest entities. In 2010, after a 13-year hiatus, a newly consistent lineup of musicians has yielded some of the most exciting, intense music of Gira’s storied career. Despite success, Swans’s upcoming LP The Glowing Man (June 17, via Gira’s own Young God Records) has been announced by Gira, 62, as the last from this specific group of members. “I’ll continue to make music under the name Swans, with a revolving cast of collaborators,” he said when announcing the record. VF.com talked with Gira before he embarks on the climactic post-release world tour. Vanity Fair: When you announced The Glowing Man’s release and touring schedule, you said it would be the final offering from this particular lineup of Swans. What went into that decision? Michael Gira: Um, seven years......
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Drowned In Sound Glowing Man Review
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Swans - The Glowing Manby Benjamin Bland http://drownedinsound.com/releases/19480/reviews/4150146 The Glowing Man is set to be the end of an(other) era of Swans, an era in which Michael Gira and company have firmly reasserted their position as one of (if not the) most important bands in existence. It was announced last year that this, the band’s fourth album since reactivation in 2010, would be the last with this line-up. Anyone who has seen Swans over the last six years will be acutely aware that this has not been a 'reunion' in any traditional sense of the word. The combination of Gira, guitarists Christoph Hahn and Norman Westberg, bassist Chris Pradvica, and drummers Thor Harris and Phil Puleo (aided by multi-instrumentalist Bill Rieflin in the studio) has proved to be the most devastatingly effective one in the band’s lengthy history. Much of the success of the Swans reunion has been the sextet’s ability to simultaneously up the stakes across all departments. Comparisons with the group’s earliest material might well be unnecessary, but it’s hard to dismiss the idea that somehow this incarnation of Swans has managed to be heavier and more uncompromising whilst simultaneously being more spiritual and – at times –......
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Sydney Morning Herald Glowing Man Review
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SwansTHE GLOWING MAN (Mute/Create Control)★★★★ The Glowing Man is, according to Michael Gira, a record in which the Swans leader – 62 years old, 14 LPs in – stares into the face of mortality, infinity, God. It sounds like it, too; such lofty thematic ambition matched across a two-hour triple-album striving for the firmament, the transcendent. Its road-tested, drone-laced, doom-etched jams are foreboding, colossal. The opening suite, Cloud Of Forgetting/Cloud Of Unknowing is 38 minutes of thunderous drums, storm and stress; the title-track a 28-minute opus of agitato guitars and fervent moans. It ends with Finally Peace, whose sing-song mantra and tender harmonies find, at last, equanimity, acceptance. Anthony Carewhttp://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/eg-album-reviews-june-17-20160609-gpfbkt...
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Spectrum Culture Glowing Man Review
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Swans: The Glowing ManIt is safe to say that this is the best, most ambitious formation of the band ever assembled.by Jake Cole http://spectrumculture.com/2016/06/16/swans-glowing-man/ As the current iteration of Swans, Michael Gira’s mighty, terrifying unit of unclassifiable noise, reaches its conclusion, it is safe to say that it is the best, most ambitious formation of the band ever assembled. Originally an outlet for its frontman’s youthful rage and punctuated by deliberately repulsive lyrics that luxuriated in toxic nihilism, the Swans that is releasing The Glowing Man represents something more reflective of its namesake’s beauty. If 2014’s To Be Kind found the group wrangling its epic industrial squall into a monstrous parallel of Indian classical music, all spiritual release, their final album for the time being builds to a calmer benediction. As with all of the band’s post-reformation albums, The Glowing Man was honed on the road, morphing out of improvised departures from prior songs and gradually sculpted into a clearer shape. Anyone who saw the band live on their recent tour or got their hands on the crowd-funded live album The Gate will have heard tracks like “Cloud of Forgetting” and “Frankie M” in gestational form. The most curious element......