PRESS
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Swans | Soundtracks for the Blind | Review
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METROLAND, Albany, NY | J. Eric Smitha whole that transcends its parts by devouring and eradicating themSoundtracks for the Blind is a two-disc set featuring found sounds, live tracks, tape loops, hand-held cassette recordings and multi-track studio works by various Swans incarnations—all digitally manipulated, molested, collaged and compiled into a whole that transcends its parts by devouring and eradicating them. Swans mainstays Michael Gira and Jarboe have announced that this will be Swans' final studio album, and that after a farewell tour this spring, the 15-year old band will be replaced by two new projects: The Body Lovers (specializing in lengthy shifting, mutating, mangled, musical and non-musical sound passages) and the Pleasure Seekers (offering long narrative songs in a primarily acoustic format). There's a rub that comes from knowing Gira and Jarboe's future plans: Soundtracks for the Blind is a powerful record filled with lengthy slow-burners, acoustic passages and molested soundscapes—which of course makes it seem more like the first Pleasure Seekers or Body Lovers album than like the last Swans record. This feeling of not-Swans and nextness is exacerbated by the fact that Gira and Jarboe are the only two performers on Soundtracks without the word "guest" appended to......
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Swans | Soundtracks for the Blind | Review
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METROLAND, Albany, NY | J. Eric Smitha whole that transcends its parts by devouring and eradicating themSoundtracks for the Blind is a two-disc set featuring found sounds, live tracks, tape loops, hand-held cassette recordings and multi-track studio works by various Swans incarnations—all digitally manipulated, molested, collaged and compiled into a whole that transcends its parts by devouring and eradicating them. Swans mainstays Michael Gira and Jarboe have announced that this will be Swans' final studio album, and that after a farewell tour this spring, the 15-year old band will be replaced by two new projects: The Body Lovers (specializing in lengthy shifting, mutating, mangled, musical and non-musical sound passages) and the Pleasure Seekers (offering long narrative songs in a primarily acoustic format). There's a rub that comes from knowing Gira and Jarboe's future plans: Soundtracks for the Blind is a powerful record filled with lengthy slow-burners, acoustic passages and molested soundscapes—which of course makes it seem more like the first Pleasure Seekers or Body Lovers album than like the last Swans record. This feeling of not-Swans and nextness is exacerbated by the fact that Gira and Jarboe are the only two performers on Soundtracks without the word "guest" appended to......
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Swans | Soundtracks for the Blind | Review
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Sound Views Subterranean Music & Culture | Chesley H.it's something of a masterpieceThematic and nonbattering yet still penetratingly eerie sound, from these veteran noise minstrels. It's a two CD set, released on the eve of their supposedly final tour, and yes, it's something of a masterpiece. Repeating melodies, twisted through tangles of effects and grandiose drama, weave a creepy epic that follows through from beginning to end, occasionally with vocals, often without. A few tracks feature samples of a phlegmy voiced man talking about some order of sordid exploit, while others about illness and loss of vision. I'm not sure to what end these literal segments means, but regardless, the whole still encompasses a relentless ominous sense. Track number seven on the first disc comes in the form of an idiosyncratic dance number—indicting a certain overly exposed, insatiable media beastess. Curiously, each word of the refrain in that song ultimately contorts into the word "whore." Considering that it comes from Jarboe, the velocity of many years experience inside the dirty machinations of rotten rock, adds pressure to the words' impact. As a whole, this record is a testament to time and toil that interlaces aesthetic and substance together in one......
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Swans | Soundtracks for the Blind | Review
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Lumpe Housea disturbing zenith of every good and bad idea the Swans have embraced throughout their long careerAt least 15 torturous years of experience and idea have been distilled into a 2 CD set heavy with delicate melodies and apology, creating a disturbing zenith of every good and bad idea the Swans have embraced throughout their long No New York career. Pieces of conversation, crude and also plaintive vocals by Jarboe, songs more appropriate for World of Skin albums, Gira's poetry, soft instrumental interludes, struggling parts of curiosities culminate in an uncomfortably dramatic display of anguish and relief, a gutted and forsaken attempt at forcing the final fingers down the throats of the Swans as a collective band forever. From this point on it's a long look backwards, which Atavistic is aiding by reissuing a vast back catalog of material, and helping make this legendary band available post mortem. This is one of the most unpleasant yet cathartic and esoteric collections of Swans songs, a final affirmation of the horrors of perpetual internal breakdown coupled with a nihilistic public cry for attention by a band so seeped in a perpetual cycle of sin and salvation it can no longer hold......
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Swans | Die Tür Ist Zu / Soundtracks for the Blind | Review
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Your Flesh #35perhaps their most seductively accommodating music"Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily; being extinguished. Not as a function of a death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition. ...the refrain itself is the content of music. The refrain is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it.... Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Yet again, SWANS brilliantly isolate the element of music which is its limiting factor—the refrain. Taking repetition to its extreme aberration, music ceases to represent a "song" and becomes dissipated fragments. Here, perhaps their most seductively accommodating music, SWANS close the door on their long-running project to shatter musical forms. And far from exhibiting the "brutal antipathy" most writers seem to associate with their music, SWANS are a celebration of life to the point of annihilation....