PRESS
-
Aural Aggravation leaving meaning. Review
()
https://auralaggravation.com/2019/09/26/swans-leaving-meaning/ Young God / Mute 25th October 2019 Christopher Nosnibor On receipt of the new Swans album, I posted on Facebook that I was ‘too excited to download it.’ This wasn’t sarcasm or bathos. The arrival of a new Swans album is always an event of no small magnitude, and with a certain sense of duty to deliver a review of a band I’ve revered my entire adult life comes a certain weight of responsibility to do justice. Swans have always been more than merely a band, standing as a sonic entity with almost infinite capacity to overwhelm. And they haven’t lost that. Their last three studio albums, The Seer (2012), To Be Kind (2014) and The Glowing Man (2016) redefined epic and over their course took extended improvisational forms to a logical conclusion, each with a duration in the region of two hours. Given the tone of Michael Gira’s statement about the end of the iteration of the band who produced these albums, Leaving Meaning brings two substantial surprises, the first being that many of the personnel from the previous incarnation remain present, and the second being the speed of its arrival. Kristof Hahn remains in the latest lineup, which also features eternal mainstay Norman Westberg –......
-
Riot Material leaving meaning. Review
()
https://www.riotmaterial.com/swans-leaving-meaning/ Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning OCTOBER 11, 2019 BY JOHN PAYNE Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which he formed Angels of Light, Gira re-formed Swans in 2010 and proceeded to release a series of exceedingly, brutally beautiful double-CDs of mental mayhem-catharsis. The new Leaving Meaning, as the title might indicate, is a study in ambiguity and its cousin obliqueness, while not quite touching on ambivalence. To achieve the album’s sonically spectacular sagas, Gira drew upon several excellent “other music”-type players and thinkers, “selected,” he says, “for both their musical and personal character.” Participants include past Swans mates Kristof Hahn (guitars, vocals, mixes) and drummer/Mellotron-ist Larry Mullin (a.k.a. Toby Dammit, ex-Silver Apples, Residents and currently Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds keyboardist); Thor Harris on percussion, trumpet, clarinet, sounds, bells, vibes; electronics wiz Ben Frost; Anna and Maria von Hausswolff on choral backing vocals, and the incredible neo-cabaret singer-pianist Baby Dee. Well, it’s expressionist, maybe. Leaving’s songs are only songs per se, the majority of them structured as repeated......
-
mxdwn leaving meaning. Review
()
https://music.mxdwn.com/2019/10/31/reviews/swans-leaving-meaning/ Swans – Leaving Meaning DREW PITT OCTOBER 31ST, 2019 - 9:00 AM A New Era Begins Few bands have garnered the legacy, impact and critical acclaim that Swans have over nearly forty years. Even fewer have managed to consistently create intrigue with their releases over such an extended period of time. Where many are content to stay in their lane with a few shifts here and there, Swans have changed from No-Wave to Post-Rock and finally into something entirely unique. Their fourth album, Leaving Meaning, pushes them further along their own direction, while not greatly expanding on the ideas before. Instead, it rolls the emotions of those massive projects that preceded it into a closer, more intimate experiment. Kicking off this journey is the one-two punch of “Hums” and “Annaline.” These two tracks don’t go very far to separate themselves, with “Hums” largely serving as an introduction to “Annaline,” but they do go a long way towards setting up the tone of the record. Both tracks are brighter and more lovely than nearly any Swans track of the past ten years, but there is an undertone of darkness. Something in the way the notes drone beneath the twinkling guitars, and the......
-
Brainwashed leaving meaning. Review
()
http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12182:swans-qleaving-meaningq&catid=13:albums-and-singles&Itemid=133 Swans, "Leaving Meaning" Sunday, 27 October 2019 17:33 Creaig Dunton Michael Gira may have announced that Leaving Meaning would feature Swans continuing in a different form after closing the book on The Glowing Man in 2016. The change has been comparably more subtle than the stylistic shifts of the band throughout their nearly 40 year career, but the progress is distinct. This record draws not only from the recent albums, but also Gira's work with the interim Angels of Light project as well. The album is the perfect blend of the past and the recent, but looks direction to the future as well. Young God Records The most significant difference between this album and the recent Swans catalogue is essentially Gira dialing back the intensity both in arrangements and performance. This is abundantly clear on a song such as "Annaline": shimmering accents drift above sparse piano and acoustic guitar, with Gira's vocals front and center. The sound is rather consistent with what he was doing with The Angels of Light in the early part of the 2000s: stripped down folk-y ballads with an experimental undercurrent throughout. On "What is This?," Swans go a bit further, melding those folk elements into an almost 1960s pop......
-
Rock and Roll Globe leaving meaning. Review & Interview
()
https://rockandrollglobe.com/psychedelics/swans-leaving-meaning-interview/ Swans Mean Business The RNR Globe’s exclusive chat with Michael Gira on his longtime collective’s 15th LP Leaving Meaning October 21, 2019 Katherine Yeske Taylor Even though it’s 8:30 a.m., Swans frontman Michael Gira is impeccably articulate and polite when he calls from his home “somewhere in Pennsylvania.” He’s up this early because he soon needs to leave for the airport – he’s flying to Latvia, the first stop on a three-week solo tour across Eastern Europe. In the midst of that, on October 25, Swans will release their 15th studio album, Leaving Meaning (Young God Records), featuring a lengthy cast of collaborators, including guitarist Kristof Hahn (Les Hommes Sauvages), drummer/keyboardist Larry Mullins (Iggy Pop; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and bassist Yoyo Röhm. The album is receiving excellent advance reviews for its densely textured soundscapes, so it’s likely to be the latest successful installment in Gira’s remarkably prolific and musically varied career. When Swans first emerged from New York City’s downtown scene in 1982, they were notorious for their sonic harshness, but over the ensuing decades Gira (the only constant member in the band’s ever-evolving lineup) has demonstrated a talent for writing quietly beautiful songs, as well. Throughout all of his work, though, Gira......