Fun Stuff > BAND
Wink Wink 2011 - A bit of a change this year
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The Dodos - No Color (2011)
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ahhh been waiting some time for this beaut. its just as amazing as you'd expect it. enjoy!
KvP:
Okay, time for Swans. The always-dubious Sascha Frere-Jones called them "The ultimate all-or-nothing band", but those with any sort of penchant for dark and / or loud music should give them a shot. I don't have the full discog but I have enough to serve as an adequate introduction to the band.
First, text. Swans was (for awhile, and now again) the primary focus of Michael Gira, who grew up in the 60's and 70's in California and Europe, the son of an alcoholic mother and a businessman father who didn't have a relationship with his son that would allow him influence. He dropped out of high school his sophomore year. After being arrested for selling drugs in Jerusalem, he returned to Los Angeles, got his GED, and enrolled in art school, playing in punk bands but aspiring to be a visual artist, meeting a young Kim Gordon. He moved to New York in 1979, played in Glenn Branca's guitar ensemble, started up his first NY band, Circus Mort, and then broke it up to form Swans. As part of the short-lived NY No Wave scene Swans made fast friends with Sonic Youth, and they shared rehearsal space in Gira's apartment and toured together through the south and midwest, with Sonic Youth opening for Swans, who antagonized most of the people who showed up into leaving early (Thurston Moore later said "... we belonged together. Neither of us felt too much affinity toward any other contemporary bands.").
They broke in Europe and the UK press started to hype them as "the loudest band in existence", which perpetually pissed off Gira, up until the point where he cited the band's reputation as a reason for its dissolution in '97. He was also unhappy with the crowds - he disliked people walking out, but he also disliked the increasing numbers of metalheads who would show up to enjoy their music. During European tours he would sometimes have the doors to the venue locked after they started playing.
Gira and Swans were essentially misanthropic, and that came out in their music. It's not exactly metal and it's not really punk - it's certainly very loud and abrasive but there isn't any irony or sneer to the music. They were a humorless, confrontational, very caustic band, with no melodies to speak of (Gira would often strip naked, spit on the audience, bludgeon and throw himself against monitors, etc.) and lyrics inspired by Jean Genet and the Marquis De Sade. The first years of Swans would end up being a formative influence on a lot of extreme noise groups in ensuing decades. The mid-to-late 80's found Swans in more overt industrial mode, very rhythm-focused but still trading in jagged guitar feedback and Gira's bellowing vocals. Around this time, Gira's partner Jarboe joined the band and became an integral member, providing a less aggressive but no less dark element to the band on keys and adding her bluesy Joplin-esque voice to Gira's as co-lead.
In the 90's the band's sound palette considerably expanded, as did the track lengths (reflecting the marathon-length walls of sound of their live show). The music got less abrasive, included recognizable melodies, and Gira began to croon more than he yelled. Folk, drone and electronic influences creeped into their sound, and they essentially started making post-rock years before Godspeed defined the genre. After releasing the double album Soundtracks for the Blind and a double-live album called Swans Are Dead, Gira broke up Swans (as well as, presumably, his relationship with Jarboe). Gira founded Young God, an indie record label through which he first re-released older out-of-print Swans material, and then began breaking NYC-based bands he enjoyed, notably Akron/Family (his favorite band, reportedly) and Devendra Banhart, as well as releasing his own post-Swans project Angels of Light, which was explicitly in the dark folk vein of the Young God catalog (including several collaborative efforts with Akron/Family).
Sometime in the latter half of the 00's, while playing a show on tour with Akron/Family as his backing band, Gira abruptly decided that he needed to start Swans back up. In 2009 he brought together a number of long-time associates (including core member and guitarist Norman Westberg, but notably not Jarboe, who has had a robust solo career and has collaborated with seemingly every single metal band influenced in any way by Swans) most of whom were from the mid-to-late Swans eras and his Angels of Light rolodex and began recording an album. That album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky, was rapturously received for a "comeback" album, and they've been on tour ever since. I recently saw them in Denver and drank deep of the cult kool-aid at that point.
Swans - Cop / Young God / Greed / Holy Money
I don't have Filth, their debut LP, but I do have Cop / Young God / Greed / Holy Money, which collects the band's output from '84-'86. Cop and Young God, which make up the first disc, are akin to Filth in their feedback-scorched No Wave / sludge / metal sound. "Cop" is a classic (the band also courted some controversy over naming one of their songs "Raping a Slave"). Greed and Holy Money are more in line with the harsh post-industrial genre that was being explored across the pond by Coil and others - there's more use of empty space and a much greater focus on drumming, plus the fateful addition of Jarboe, who contributes Swans' first "quiet" songs. Of the early studio albums, they are my favorite.
Cop / Young God
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Greed / Holy Money
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Swans - Public Castration Is A Good Idea
This is the official document of the Swans live show circa Holy Money. I don't know if I'd call it "you are there" type stuff, but Gira's explosive intensity is on full display and it's easy to imagine how terrifying it would have been to attend such a show in '86 (though he was plenty intense in 2011). Video of the show was also recorded and released as A Long Slow Screw, some of which is up on youtube. One of the heaviest, darkest things I've ever heard.
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Swans - Children Of God
Widely considered to be a "breakthrough", or at least a ligament, between the abrasive heaviness of early Swans and the more adventurous late Swans, and recorded with probably the best Swans lineup - Gira and Jarboe, reliable axeman Norman Westberg, and drummer Ted Parsons, who would go on to drum in a number of highly-regarded metal bands. As an album it's still possessed of a lot of the aggression of the 80's period but more varied in terms of sound and texture. Heavily focused on religion in that classic metal way.
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Swans - The Burning World
An anomaly, considered by the band to be a misstep. Swans was a little bit ahead of the curve on the indie music trend of signing to a major label they were clearly not cut out for, and then returning to the indie camp wiser for it. Post-industrial hired gun Bill Laswell was hired for production duties and kind of made a mess of things. It is easily the least "powerful" of the Swans albums. If nothing else, "The River that Runs with Love Won't Run Dry" anticipates Deerhunter a decade and change before they formed. Not really indicative of their sound from any other time, but it's still Swans, Laswell or no.
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Swans - White Light From the Mouth of Infinity
A great rebound from the (comparitive) low of The Burning World, and the album that really set out the direction for Swans in the 90's - less direct, confrontational rage, more expansive and majestic sounds beyond guitar feedback and metal drum assaults, and Gira's shift into a Johnny Cash-ish crooner ("Better Than You" sort of plants the seeds for the Angels of Light project later on). They never really lost their power, but they found ways not to be staid in a particular place.
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Next came Love of Life, which I don't have!
Swans - Omniscience
The official document of Swans' mid-period live show, from the Love of Life era. Allmusic has a better rundown than I could give.
--- Quote from: Allmusic ---Beginning with the surging, sweeping crunch of "Mother's Milk," with some great Jarboe vocals over it all, Omniscience is a live album which benefits from the inclusion of some otherwise unrecorded or unreleased Swans tracks. Taken from dates on the 1992 Love of Life tour, the album showcases a newly solidified touring lineup of Gira, Jarboe, Steele, returning veteran Kizys, and Vincent Signorelli, drummer on the two previous albums. The sound is clear and sharp, a distinct change from the sometimes muddy official bootlegs of years past. Most of the familiar tracks are unsurprisingly from Love of Life, including "Her," "The Other Side of the World," and that album's title track in an extended take with a wholly new and incredibly dramatic instrumental coda. However, interesting choices like a version of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog," originally done by Jarboe and Gira for the third Skin album, appear as well. "Will Serve" is a fantastic number appearing only here, starting with a delicate guitar intro and swiftly turning into a cinematic, soaring piece -- a lovely demonstration of Swans now at their newly inspiring best. "Amnesia" gets a particularly fierce take on the disc, with woodwind-like keyboards providing delicacy as the song rips along with further sonic touches like howling winds and breaking glass. Ending with a fine version of "God Bless America" and the new, slow-grinding "Omnipotent," Omniscience is yet another excellent addition to Swans' body of work. As an extra note, illustrations by Deryk Thomas, cover artist for the two studio albums previous to this release, are included in the CD booklet; continuing the child/rabbit theme of those covers, the paintings here are at once shockingly, horrifyingly violent and perversely beautiful, as perfect a complement to the band's work as any over the years.
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Swans - The Great Annihilator
After a few years in the wilderness feuding with the Sky label they were previously on, Swans returned with Westberg and Parsons in tow to push their sound further forward, this time in a more grandiose goth rock direction. Songs like "Celebrity Lifestyle" could have been Smashing Pumpkins tracks without Gira's deep baritone, but overall the album really holds up. Gira's lyrics are typically dark ("Killing For Company" is famously about Dennis Nielsen, a serial killer who would murder gay men and have sex with their corpses) but his delivery is usually subdued. The band is more melodically-oriented than they had ever been.
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Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind
1996 saw Gira announcing the dissolution of Swans, to be kicked off by one last album and a farewell tour. Soundtracks for the Blind was a double album that found the band on the opposite end of the sound spectrum from where they started. Branca-indebted gutar drones, full-length ambient soundscapes, some weird proto-techno outings (courtesy of Jarboe) and extended passages of pounding drums and chords, plus scattered use of random found-sound recordings of interviews and the like that are often ridiculous before they start getting unsettling. Really sprawling and exhausting in one sitting, but there's a lot to explore, and the depth of the music is greater than much of their previous output. A pretty big influence on lots of post-rock and post-metal that would come after it, especially the work of Justin Broadrick and Jesu, whose sound fits seamlessly into the palette offered by this album.
Pt 1
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Pt 2
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Swans - Swans Are Dead
The official document of The Great Annihilator and Soundtracks for the Blind tours, featuring different lineups (the latter with Phil Puleo, late of Cop Shoot Cop, who would return with Gira 13 years later). Allmusic's got me here.
--- Quote from: Allmusic ---Perhaps fittingly, given the huge amount of live CDs and recordings put out by Swans during their lifetime and even after, this, the band's final statement, captures performances from the last two touring lineups of the band, from 1995's Great Annihilator tour (the Mullins/Vudi/Goldring lineup also featured on Die Tür ist Zu) and the last tour from 1997, featuring recent Swans stalwart guitarist Steele, Bill Bronson on bass, and ex-Cop Shoot Cop drummer Phil Puleo on skins. The two-disc set is, unsurprisingly, split between the two lineups. The 1995 disc is taken wholly from a show in Norway, mixing a variety of then-unreleased tunes (including the two lengthy stunners surfacing on Soundtracks, "Helpless Child" and "The Sound," both played fantastically here) with both solo and Swans material. The thoroughly re-worked, Jarboe-sung version of "Your Property," aka "Yrp," gets another excellent airing, while her own track "Lavender Girl" also gets quite a lovely yet disturbing run-through. The 1997 disc, collects tracks from a variety of performances during the tour. Similarly, it mixes newer songs, including Gira's lengthy, style-shifting musical retrospective on Swans, "Feel Happiness," and "New Mother," which would eventually feature in much simpler form as the title track for Gira's Angels of Light project, although here it builds into a roaring, free-form explosion, with solo selections and at times drastically reworked takes on older Swans/Skin material. Most notable are two of the final tracks: a fantastic, utterly horrifying Jarboe-sung version of "I Crawled" from the untitled 1984 EP, and "Blood Promise," originally from The Great Annihilator. Throughout both discs the audiences are loudly and happily appreciative, and understandably so -- they were watching one of the greatest bands wrap up their astonishing career with fire.
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Black
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White
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KvP:
Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky
After 13 years of recording dark folk and and blues under the Angels of Light moniker, Gira decided to bring Swans back with My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky (a reference to suicide by hanging), sans Jarboe, and at first listen it sounds more like a more aggressive Angels of Light than vintage Swans. But the truth of the matter is that AoL were in Swans before Swans was in AoL. Perhaps as a result of all that, it's a really good entry point for people who are new to the Swans oeuvre. Gira's voice isn't as deep as it used to be (he was 55 when he recorded the album), but he takes on the cadence of something like a pentecostal preacher throughout. Its only flaw is that it's too short. Guest turns from Bill Rieflin and Devendra Banhart included. Here's the announcement:
--- Quote from: Michael Gira ---There was a point a few years ago during a particular show when I was on tour with Angels of Light, with Akron/Family serving as the backing band. It was during the song The Provider. Seth’s guitar was sustaining one open chord (very loudly), rising to a peak, then crashing down again in a rhythm that could have been the equivalent of a deep and soulful act of copulation. The whole band swayed with this arc. Really was like riding waves of sound. I thought right then, “You know, Michael, Swans wasn’t so bad after all...” - ha ha! It brought back – in a flood – memories, or maybe not memories, more a tangible re-emersion in the sensation of Swans music rushing through my body in waves, lifting me up towards what, I can only assume, will be my only experience of heaven. It’s difficult – and probably pointless – to try to describe this experience. It’s ecstatic, I suppose – a force of simultaneous self negation and rebirth. Really, I probably only experienced this a handful of times to such an extreme extent during the entire 15 year history of Swans. All the elements have to align perfectly, and you can’t force it, though you might constantly strive for it. I don’t mean to be too lofty here, but it’s a fact. I’m talking about my own experience of the music (though I’d hope people in the audiences along the way might have experienced a similar episode). When I ask myself if I believe in God, I start to say NO, but then I remember that sensation, and I’m not so sure. So I want more of that, before my body breaks down to such an extent that it won’t be possible any more. So I’m doing it.
THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that.
Since the musicians live in different places on the planet, the idea of rehearsal for the recordings was both impractical and expensive. They had all heard the material in demo form, so were basically familiar with the material. In order to both allow time to work out the songs as a band with a distinct personality, and to ensure freshness in the performance, they recorded the basic tracks for one song per day over a period of 12 – 14 hours each day.
Once they’d reached a peak, having hashed the songs over (and over) and reconfigured them from their original demo form into something unique to the group, the engineer hit record. Basic overdubs were done at the end of the same day.
...
The recording of this record was made possible by the sale of a limited edition of 1000, handmade CD/DVD package exclusively at younggodrecords.com. The music CD consisted of Gira’s acoustic demos of several songs under consideration for the new Swans album and the DVD was 2 live shows of Gira solo. Gira hand printed the edition - named I Am Not Insane - (with wood block), hand colored each one individually, and assembled the 1000 copies himself. The expectation was that it would take 3 or 4 months to sell out through the limited venue of the YGR website. It sold out in 2 weeks.
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Michael Gira - I Am Not Insane
A limited edition (of 1,000) hand-printed, hand-colored CDRs of MFWGMUARTTS demos, recorded solo by Gira, sold to finance the album's recording. Gira runs Young God records by himself, from his home, so he didn't have a lot of financial power to release his music.
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Swans - Look At Me Go
The second disc to the MFWGMUARTTS Special Edition CD set, Look At Me Go is a contiguous mix of alternate versions of MFWGMUARTTS songs. The cover art looks to be from the "NO" zine that Gira published for a brief period in his art school / punk days.
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Yet more errata to come.
TheFuriousWombat:
Thanks so much for all the Swans stuff! They're a band I've always meant to get into but really never knew where or how to start so those posts are really helpful
yellowfoliage:
Thank you thank you thank you thank you.
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