A new Swans album is always a great and welcome thing. Michael Gira’s creative mind is relentlessly productive, with new twists and turns, ideas and developments around every musical corner. How he finds the time and energy in between seemingly endless tours and ultra-cathartic performances is a mystery.
To Be Kind, the most recent offering, is a very different album compared to the previous two: The Seer and My father will guide me up a rope to the sky. It contains a wider range of musical styles but still grabs hold of you instantly. It’s an over-used term, I know, but this album really is… Magical. Hypnotic.
Although unmistakably Swansy, To be kind is a major step forward stylistically. References are stacked in a dynamic rainbow and made coherent through Swans’ highly energetic aural filter. How this translates into a live situation I look forward to seeing and hearing. Anyone who’s ever been to a Swans concert knows the intensity and power present. Raw and violent walls of sound through which rays of light appear and mesmerize – always an active physical experience as much as a passive listening/emotional one.
To be kind integrates blues, rocky riffing, sound collages, emotionally ambient scapes, and even funk… Hommages to all kinds of great electrified American music punch you right in the face. Sweet pain! It’s like a new crown jewel of “The post WW2 and Vietnam war American song book”, previously so perfectly epitomized by The Stooges’ seminal Funhouse album. Swans carry on in a tradition of music stripped bare – to the skeleton-bare.
Sometimes chaotic and violent and sometimes ethereally serene, Michael Gira’s vocals play second fiddle this time around. In a sense, this makes the effect of the words even more powerful. The repetitive vistas of tough sounds embed the often desperate vocal expressions and make them pierce – and break – any preconceived notions or expectations even more. The restraint builds even more tension, so to speak.
Swans’ formula is usually to make things as intense as possible and then just increase the pace even more. They have done this successfully before, many times, as has Gira in his solo and other projects. To be kind is less of a full frontal attack though, and more of an emotional sparring experience. Gira acts as the reigning heavyweight champion and his sparring partner is a three-dimensional mirror, reflecting and challenging him on to new feats and even more emotional stripping. It truly is impressing, and sometimes terrifyingly so.
Swans represent many things. One of the key qualities – for me anyway – is the untainted and undiluted sense of integrity and uncompromising audacity to push onwards, whether it hurts or not. To be kind is a diamond-hard example of exactly this attitude.
As always: take it or leave it. I, for one, will take it and play it on repeat. Progress makes perfect.
Swans: To be kind, Young God Records/Mute, 2014. Double CD, Triple Vinyl, digital.
