PRESS
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"To Be Kind" Review | Stereogum
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Have you ever heard voices? The sound of people echoing around in your head, unsettling you deeply, even when you know they’re not real? I have. Only a couple of times. Didn’t last long. I was at the library near my house one day once, maybe nine years old, spending hours paging through old movie reference books because I was a weird kid, almost falling asleep, when I heard my mom’s voice. She wasn’t talking, exactly. Or maybe she was. I could definitely hear my name a few times, but everything else was a damp echoing blur. It was like she was multitracked, layers of shards of words coming at me from every direction, never adding up to something I could interpret. She sounded pissed at me; I knew that much. But I couldn’t piece together why. And it wasn’t really her, anyway. It was my brain, fucking with me. It terrified me. Today, decades later, I think about that moment and my blood runs cold. The reason I’m bringing it up is that there’s a moment maybe eight minutes into “Just A Little Boy (For Chester Burnett),” the second song on the new Swans album To Be Kind, that brings me back, viscerally, to......
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NPR First Listen | "To Be Kind"
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Only on occasion does it make sense to praise music as scary, and somehow many of those occasions coincide with Swans sending new sounds out into the world. Since 1982, when the band emerged from the same New York "no wave" scene as noise-rock acts like Sonic Youth, Swans' seething intensity has been a default mode. Every element of the Swans sound is alarming, brutal, dark and sublimely beautiful for all the rage that gets articulated — and the sense of release that gets promised, too. After a fateful demise in the '90s (see the live-recorded, um, swan songSwans Are Dead) and a resurrection in 2010, the group has been on an improbable hot streak ever since, culminating with 2012's The Seer and a traveling road show that threatened to tear apart the fabric of the cosmos every time Michael Gira and his collaborators took the stage. To Be Kind, fans of aural menace will be pleased to know, follows suit. "Screenshot" opens on a telltale skulking, stalking note, with repetitive curls of guitar and bass that make for a cruel kind of disembodied funk doled out in slow motion. Gira's vocals occupy a style somewhere between a whisper and a growl, and......
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Kerrang! Magazine | "To Be Kind"
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The Line of Best Fit, Album of the Week: "To Be Kind"
() - SWANS
You’ve probably seen them; they’re everywhere these days: pictures of nice pleasant beaches, gently undulating hills, or soft dappled light flowing through breaks in a woodland canopy, all accompanied by some godawful pious quote about the singular importance of kindness. They spread through the internet like an outbreak of cholera. Kurt Vonnegut: ‘There’s only one rule that I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ Henry James: ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.’ There’s always something unendurably smug about these homilies on kindness, something important that’s lacking in a view of the world in which the most important thing is a duty of vague pleasantness. As it turns out, what’s been missing all this time is a two-hour double album of thunderous, stomping noise. And out of the kindness of their hearts, that’s exactly whatSwans have given us. Musically, To Be Kind doesn’t offer an enormous deal of innovation on its predecessor – but when that predecessor is 2012’s sprawling epic masterpiece The Seer, that’s hardly a bad thing. To Be Kind progresses through long, winding drones and tiny tight riffs,......
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Music OHM | Swans "To Be Kind" Review
() - SWANS
Rarely, if ever, is a band afforded as much praise, opinion, reverence – and time – as M. Gira’s Swans. Praise because more often than not they deserve it; opinion because more often than not different people hear different things in the music; reverence because there’s a significant lack of bands with such a monstrous catalogue (possibly only Nick Cave trumps Gira’s band in hit-to-miss ratio); time because, well, their last two records have – for better or worse – seemed to go on for an age. At some point when you’re listening to To Be Kind, you have to stop. You have to take a break. It is simply impossible to listen to the entire thing in one go. In the two hours that To Be Kind occupies, you could listen to the first three Stooges albums and still have 15 minutes spare (there’s a track on To Be Kind that is longer than the entirety of Raw Power – that’s not even a lie). You could listen to the first Swans record three times in two hours. Hell, the last album you listened to that even came close to two hours was probably The Seer, unless you’re into prog-rock. The question is, is it......