PRESS
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Time Out London | "To Be Kind" Review
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The New York noise veterans have created an awe-inspiring monster of a triple album – again When apocalyptic alt rock warriors Swans toured around the release of 2012’s monolithic triple album ‘The Seer’, one might conceivably have expected them to play a bunch of tracks from 2012’s monolithic triple album ‘The Seer’.But such petty concerns as ‘promotion’ do not bother band lynchpin Michael Gira, a granite crag of a man who gives every impression that he was in this world before the dawn of history and will continue playing thunderously upsetting rock right until the point the sun explodes, and probably after.It is very easy to get carried away when writing about Swans – their music isn’t so much unrecognisably ‘other’ as recognisable rock music blown up to an almost unimaginable scale. For instance: ‘To Be Kind’, the album from which Swans mostly played while touring ‘The Seer’, is ten tracks and 121 minutes long. Gira has commented that MP3 is the best format to listen to it on because it gives no pause or respite.Where ‘The Seer’ was a rich, organic work that explored the breadth of Swans’s sound, ‘To Be Kind’ is almost monomaniacal in its focus on......
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The 405 "To Be Kind" Review
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Taken at face value, you probably have to assume that the name Swans was chosen at least as a non-sequitur and likely, more deliberately, as an ironic counterpoint to the racket that Michael Gira's men actually made. How poignant, then, that it would actually come to evince some genuine validity in the band's later years; their 'reactivation' - Gira doesn't like the connotations of the word 'reunion' - has seen them carry themselves with such grace, such elegance, that you wonder why anybody guilty of resurrecting their old outfit purely for financial reasons doesn't simply melt with shame at the mention of Swans' name. It seems bizarre to put it this way, but The Seer, which ran two hours and, as always, carried an aggressively experimental edge, was probably Swans' most accessible work. It certainly carried their appeal beyond the core fanbase that was delighted to hear news of their return four years ago, and perhaps that's why there isn't too much of an effort to diverge from that basic formula on To Be Kind. Any record on which the eight-minute opening track - in this case, 'Screen Shot' - feels like mere preamble is obviously going to carry with it a certain level......
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Guardian Guide | Swans Feature
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The Times Essential Tracks | Swans "A Little God In My Hands"
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Pitchfork "To Be Kind": Best New Music
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Swans were hardly the first 1980s underground-rock fixtures to resurface in the new millennium, and they’re not the only ones who've resisted the nostalgic trappings of reunion tours to make a respectable showing as a rebooted recording act. But they are the rare band of their vintage who seem less concerned with living up to or building upon a past legacy than establishing a completely different one. In retrospect, the 14 years that elapsed between 1996’sSoundtracks for the Blind and 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky were less a break-up-induced hiatus than a gestation period. The bigger, brawnier Swans that Michael Gira has assembled in its wake (complete with a strapping, bare-chested gong-smasher named Thor) are beholden neither to the primordial, industrialized sludge of the band’s infamous ’80s catalogue nor the post-goth serenity of their ’90s work. Instead, they’ve perfected a new means of transforming grostequerie into grandeur and vice versa. With 2012’s astonishingly colossal The Seer, Swans pulled off the unlikeliest of coups: A record that, over its six sides and two-hour-plus running time, was seemingly designed to test the commitment of the band’s most ardent followers yet, amazingly, expanded their audience to an unprecedented degree. (This summer, Swans are even playing the......