[Reaper16]

01. Swans – To Be Kind


Only a truly impressive instrumental performance could prevent that Sun Kil Moon album from being my favorite album of the year. Swans’ latest 2 hour monster, To Be Kind, is that performance. This is truly awe-inspiring. I loved their last album The Seer for its fearsome, expansive textures. It was bewildering & intense & one of the best (though hardest to listen to) albums of the past decade. This new album doesn’t lose any of that intensity, any of those expansive textures. But what it adds is serious groove. There’s a groove and a fierce drive to these songs that makes them catchier than The Seer material. This is an album that defies words in many ways, or at least it takes a certain amount of specific words – think an entire Cormac McCarthy album – to properly communicate how this album sounds, how it makes you feel. It really does sound like you’re out on the prairie and all of the bad things in the world are about to descend on you. Michael Gira takes repetitive bass & drums on many of these tracks & adds layers of repetitive sound on top: a cacophony of instruments including lap steel guitar, bells, viola, wind chimes, horns, backing vocals, synthesizers, layers & layers of percussion, and of course Gira’s intense lead vocals that are sometimes plainly spoken and sometimes yelled like a beast would yell. There’s no moment in 2014 music more unnerving than Gira singing “I’m just a little boy” only to be met immediately with a Greek chorus of humiliating laughter. There’s perhaps no more imposing study in the power of repetition and slow build than the album’s centerpiece 35 minute long song, “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture” which builds for 14 minutes like the whole planet is going to collapse and THAT is only a lead-in to a chanting tribute to the Haitian revolutionary who led the successful & violent slave rebellion on that island; those powerful 35 minutes are accidentally topical – they make me think about the kind of violence that might be necessary to actually get some justice out of an American police state that violently oppresses African Americans. Ultimately, the way you feel when you listen to these tracks is going to be very individualized. It’s like if a haunted house were also a contemporary abstract art gallery: there’s room in these sparse lyrics and in these gargantuan songs for your subconscious to run amok. This is an intimidating undertaking to listen, but it carries my fullest recommendation.