PRESS
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Swans | Swans Related Projects | Review
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The Wire | Biba Kopfreturn to the scenes of Swans crimesSwans Related Project: M Gira Drainland Swans Related Project: Jarboe Sacrificial Cake Down the years and despite the growth, the stylistic permutations and the occasional aberrations into something resembling warmth, Swans have been such a single-minded project you have to wonder why its perpetrator Michael Gira would need to make a solo album. Granted, you can see how Jarboe needs space elsewhere to express ideas that fall outside Gira's scheme of things. The great success of these Swans Related Projects is how they return to the scenes of Swans crimes, so to speak, and light them up differently, and then again entirely different from each other. Aptly titled, Gira's Drainland is drained of blood, tears and excess emotion. Its songs are autopsies, body parts laid out on the mortician's slab and spoken-sung in bleak monotone. Well, Gira has always been the most Beckett-like of songwriters. Interlocking word and image in a manner that superficially suggests simple body mechanics—skull connected to your neckbone, etc. Yet the accumulative impact of bare-boned lines dovetailed with equally pared rhythm and melody and muscle-toned with sparse noise samples is emotionally devastating. This is a document......
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Swans | Swans Related Projects | Review
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Hypnono way limited to any definable genreThe SWANS initial release, 4 SONG EP, in 1982 was a stunner. "Shocking" may not be too strong a word. Loud, noisy, dreadfully slow, torturous music behind even more tortured vocals. Next to this record even JOY DIVISION is a campfire sing-a-long. NICO is a cheerleader. I had not heard, up to that point, an album of such powerful grating noise, and such sadness and beauty all at the same time. The intervening recordings were always interesting. They experimented a lot. Or, at least, stylistic variation from record to record was surprisingly varied. They confounded fans. Their version of Love Will Tear Us Apart is downright pretty. Most of the fans that I know consider their output uneven, with differing and strongly held opinions on which album is strongest. SWANS consist of M. Gira and Jarboe and for the current work each of them has produced what is actually a solo record. Each contributes a CD to the two CD set. Each CD has in common a dark and noisy, how shall I say this?, lushness, fullness unusual in Noise Music. I probably shouldn't even use the term Noise Music. This work is in......
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M. Gira | Drainland | Review
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The Lizard | Jamie T. Conwayheavier than everAnd so you grow old. Naiveté is no longer your ally; forced to acknowledge the anguish and torment you so selfishly and effortlessly caused, you suffer similar betrayals without complaint, saddened not by your friends behavior but because you know their transgression was as inevitable as your own. You watch—sometimes with compassion, sometimes with guilty indifference—as tragedy comes crashing into their lives, battering them into hopeless submission. Start staring sadly at coffee stained photographs, indulging in the sappy sentimentality you despised in your youth. Then come the 2 a.m. phone calls and ward visits, the labored conversations with unrecognizable ricti, the growing realization you will one day be another crumbling, forgotten headstone in an overcrowded cemetery. And as you listen solemnly to another premature eulogy, you wish you could believe in the circuitous machinations of some idiot God as you search for a reason, a purpose, meaning, find... nothing. Eventually, all you want is to become numb, dull yourself to the pain. It's said that Michael Gira's music is no longer "heavy," as unthreatening as the bunnies adorning the cover of the later Swans albums. Wrong: it's heavier than ever, buckling under the......
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M. Gira | Drainland | Review
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The Big Issue | Rob Mitchellthe Pied Piper of nihilismThis new solo album from Michael Gira of Swans fame, confirms his standing as the Pied Piper of nihilism. It is as brutal and upsetting as it is compelling and beautiful and it forces the listener to think, to reassess, to confront the most basically held truths, a rare thing in modern music. Musically is swings between discordant sonic battery and lush, spectral almost country ballads. Lyrically, it features Gira at his bluntest. His outlook is a worst-case scenario so horrific that one would wish to deny it outright, were it not so enticing: we are all just sacks of water and germs and our lives are a meaningless mistake. Drainland screams with napalm imagery of death and misery. "You See Through Me" highlights explicitly the petty, vicious stupidity that characterizes our relationships through a quietly horrifying taped argument between a woman and her thieving, alcoholic partner. A relentlessly grim, celebrity-stalking nightmare unfolds over a whining, wheezy organ on "Fan Letter," taking the slaughterman's knife into our idol culture. Gira puts plainly the ideas we spend our lives fleeing from against startling musical backdrops. How serious he is is open to......
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M. Gira | Drainland | Review
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The Big Issue | Rob Mitchellthe Pied Piper of nihilismThis new solo album from Michael Gira of Swans fame, confirms his standing as the Pied Piper of nihilism. It is as brutal and upsetting as it is compelling and beautiful and it forces the listener to think, to reassess, to confront the most basically held truths, a rare thing in modern music. Musically is swings between discordant sonic battery and lush, spectral almost country ballads. Lyrically, it features Gira at his bluntest. His outlook is a worst-case scenario so horrific that one would wish to deny it outright, were it not so enticing: we are all just sacks of water and germs and our lives are a meaningless mistake. Drainland screams with napalm imagery of death and misery. "You See Through Me" highlights explicitly the petty, vicious stupidity that characterizes our relationships through a quietly horrifying taped argument between a woman and her thieving, alcoholic partner. A relentlessly grim, celebrity-stalking nightmare unfolds over a whining, wheezy organ on "Fan Letter," taking the slaughterman's knife into our idol culture. Gira puts plainly the ideas we spend our lives fleeing from against startling musical backdrops. How serious he is is open to......