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"To Be Kind" Review | Rolling Stone
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Experimental rockers Swans have only ever had one goal: to overwhelm. Like their last sonic saga, 2012's The Seer, their latest offers two straight hours of spook-house drones, battering-ram guitar blasts and Michael Gira's howled imperatives about love, sex and death. Songs last up to 34 minutes and alternate between jazzy post-punk ragers ("Oxygen") and trippy jams plucked from the dark side of Pink Floyd ("Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture"). Backup vocals by St. Vincent and Cold Specks provide a stylistic through line back to the shimmery 1996 LP Soundtracks for the Blind, but Gira and Co. have grown more sophisticated since then. These days, they don't just crush – they hypnotize. by KORY GROW...
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Swans deliver fearless, fierce and intense 'To Be Kind' | LA Times
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Swans' grand new album, "To Be Kind," is a career-defining work that few could have expected from a 30-plus-year project considered by many to be well past its peak. At 122 minutes, it's as long as a movie and as densely heavy as a Richard Serra sculpture. Defying easy categorization, "To Be Kind" is a rock album, but it's not something to be taken lightly. Brash, polarizing, fearless and filled with a purity of vision that would make Col. Kurtz blanch, the work features mountains of guitars and beats made with boulders, brass, laser-gun noises, guest vocals from Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent) and a sprawling vision. At various times, founder Michael Gira squawks like Johnny Rotten, at others he pleads like Patti Smith. He conjures the spirit of Jim Morrison on "She Loves Us," loses himself on the marvelous opener "Screen Shot," a man lost amid fury and rhythm. On "Bring the Sun," Gira roars like he's feral. Best, though, "To Be Kind" is fearless — unafraid to alienate, to kowtow, to expand beyond the constraints of the standard structure, to lean into the burn. At various times suggesting to the Doors' "The End," Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" or......
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Swans' 'To Be Kind' Is a Monolithic Orgy of Blood, Guts, and…Love | Spin Magazine
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Prevailing logic is that the sophomore LP is one of the most daunting challenges of a band’s career. After defining a musical voice with one record that might have taken years of prep, a band is expected to either live up to or outdo that record, and in short order. That said, some records are so big, so impactful, so daunting that they more or less reset the odometer, redefining the expectation cycle in much the same way. Over his roughly 30 years making music with Swans, Michael Gira has released a handful of albums that fit this category, moments so big that other albums respond to them (whether consciously on Gira’s behalf or in the cultural narrative) rather than merely follow them. 2012′s outstanding The Seer was one such release, an album so maximalist that its title track alone lasted longer than many albums, the entirety of the thing about as long as American History X and comparably curb-stompingly brutal. If Gira and Co. were at all interested in “following” their last LP, To Be Kind would either wind up an album that attempted to reach its predecessor’s epic, cathartic heights or an album that struck out in a new, more fragile direction. Luckily, To Be Kind doesn’t feel a need to fit this false narrative, instead......
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PopMatters | The Knife and the Blood That Ensues: An Interview with Swans
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“That sounds dark to you?” Michael Gira asks me as I describe my first time listening to “Screenshot”, the opening cut on the newest Swans LP, To Be Kind. I invoke the adjectives “intense” and “dark” in detailing the eight-minute song’s driving groove in D major. “I must be really fucking sick,” he muses, “because to me that just sounds joyous.” Gira isn’t wrong, of course. All it takes is one glance at any live footage from the Swans tours beginning in 2010 to see that, even when the music reaches pulverizing, heavy climaxes, he looks like he’s having the time of his life. While the startling cover art to the band’s magnum opusThe Seer—to say nothing of that album’s mysterious, brutal 30 minute title track—may give the indication that Swans is preoccupied with the grim, a closer examination of the music is required to get at (something like) the truth. “The Apostate”, the swan song of The Seer, caps off with Gira repeating, “We are blessed.” Few people would use the word “joyous” when describing music that utilizes images of “reeling liars in” so as to “remove their faces” and “collect their skin.” But, then again, Swans has never been about capitulating to the......
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Under the Radar Magazine | "To Be Kind" Review
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Only when it's too late do you realize that "Screen Shot," the opening track on Swans' new magnum opus, is the sound of being stalked. Michael Gira begins calmly uttering a string of seemingly random words, and as they begin to take on a dark logic, his demeanor is that of one who has all the time in the world. By the end of the piece, the room seems drained of oxygen as the music has grown as a shrill, pounding presence and Gira's mantra becomes more direct: "Love now/Breathe now/Hear now." The nine lengthy works contained in the 2-CD/3-LP To Be Kind require an investment of attention. But as with any engrossing film, time isn't a factor, and a full immersion reveals that any abridgments would have lessened these songs' impact. Moods and settings are carefully established, and as each track unfolds, it's never immediately evident whether the conclusion of any given odyssey will more likely be lyrically or viscerally climactic, or both. All bets are off with the half-hour "Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture," as the band begins a repetitive pummeling in its first few seconds and doesn't let up for a full two minutes. It's like starting a song with its closing......