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Swans, "To Be Kind"
I find it rather odd that Swans have suddenly become digital media darlings at this point in their career. Not that Michael Gira and his exemplary band are undeserving by any means, but their post-reformation output is anything but accessible or commercially friendly. Small clips or snippets might seem to belie the force of their early records, but as full compositions these songs are anything but conventional. As great as The Seer was, To Be Kind is an even more focused distillation of the best moments of that record, while still maintaining that grandiose scale that no other band manages to reach.
To Be Kind unsurprisingly fits nicely next to The Seer in overall style, but refines the moments of that record to an even sharper focus and eschewing the stuff from that album that did not sit as well with me.Epic bombast is the name of the game here, with most of these songs fitting in most comfortably aside the aforementioned album's title song and "The Apostate" in their mantra-like repetitions that build to glorious climaxes of noise and chaos.
There is a more significant studio dynamic when compared to The Seer, like due to the recording and engineering work by John Congleton, with Gira at the production helm.The result is a slightly thicker, more treated and effected sound rather than the stripped down, live-in-the-studio feel of the past two albums.This works quite well:no matter how well recorded an album is, it cannot fully capture the intensity of Swans in concert, so the additional production results in a different type of heaviness.
Since the folk trappings of My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky have been effectively excised (largely, I assume, as the last vestiges of the Angels of Light), the album perhaps shows its closest debt to another form of American roots music, namely the blues of the early 20th century.Not this is necessarily a new thing:without the distortion, apocalyptic drums and tortured vocals of the Cop/Young God era, the overall structure of those songs was essentially blues in nature.Here the genre's influence is far more overt, such as the cyclic guitar/bass/drum arrangements of "Screen Shot" and the mid paced, slide-guitar heavy introduction to "Just a Little Boy (for Chester Burnett)," which goes as far to recognize Howlin' Wolf’s legal name in its title.That overall sound might not be as obvious throughout the remainder of the album, but the loping, repetitive approach can be heard clearly throughout.
A good portion of the ten songs that make up To Be Kind have been played on tour for the past couple of years, and even appeared on the limited Not Here/Not Now live set from last year that helped fund this recording.Never a band to fit expectations, Swans are the band that releases a new album, and plays mostly new, unreleased songs when touring to promote it.These songs, in their studio forms, stay rather faithful to their live incarnations, mostly just coming across a bit cleaner in the mix, or a bit more complex due to the tweaking and layering the setting made possible.
One song that did not appear on the live set and made for a controversial teaser for the album is "A Little God in My Hands."On first impression it was so conventional and almost pleasant, shuffling along with more than a hint of New Orleans jazz behind it.The erratic stabs of electronics and distortion kept that sense of pleasantness from settling in, and I doubt many other songs that sound superficially upbeat have "shit and blood" referenced in the lyrics."Some Things We Do" is another that appears here for the first time and is the most radical departure for the album.A melancholy duet between Gira and Little Annie with strings by Julia Kent, the music fits the humanity conveyed within the lyrics, a bit of vulnerability on this colossus of an album.
Gira's insistence that Swans are not trying to capture hatred or violence, but a sense of ecstasy, appears in an appropriately perverse fashion on "She Loves Us."The jerky rhythms and horns, paired with his revivalist, singing-in-tongues vocals on the first half make for an appropriately bizarre take on spiritual music, which is magnified in the second half.The music locks into a more traditional rhythm, as chanted and reverent "Halleluiah"s are tracked with screams of "Fuck fuck fuck/Your name is fuck!"Gira's monastic chanting on the first half of the sprawling, 34 minute "Bring in the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture" follows the opening salvo of instrumental pounding, again giving that revivalist vibe before the sound of horses heralds the full on war of the second half.Epic is an adjective that has lost most of its meaning in recent years, but here is a case where it is 100 percent appropriate.
I think we are beyond the point of Swans needing to prove that this is a full on reincarnation and not a nostalgia trip, and the singular force of To Be Kind makes this explicitly clear.Due to the drastically varying phases in their career, there is no way I could truly rank order their discography, but this album sits perfectly with the others, and for me is the most consistently brilliant in this third phase of their career.It may go without saying, but I cannot think of any artist in any genre that can still be at the top of their game over 30 years into their career and after such a long period of inactivity.Swans may have become the darlings of some hipster publications that will remain nameless, but this is a case where the hype is surrounding an album of substance, not just something that is the current flavor of the week.
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