Swans – New Noise
As soon as a band breaks up, goes on hiatus, dissolves, disintegrates or erupts into a drug-addled argument spread across various media portals, the very worst thing that can happen is that they get back together.
In the history of music, the number of successful reunions can be counted on Tony Iommi’s right hand. For fans, the prospect of a swollen swansong is buoyed along by barely contained resentment while everyone else wonders whether the constantly-promised comeback album can really be as bad as their last. Everything ends in tears and nobody is really happy. No one is ever happy.
For Swans, the prospect of getting back together raised a few arched eyebrows here and there but most people remained unmoved. After a fourteen year break between 1996’s Soundtracks for the Blind and 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, the bloated drift towards the tame that affects most musical acts in their old age was treated with a sneer and a snark.
Always abrasive, the break had only served to distil the confrontational musical sensibilities of the group. Whereas many disbanded acts attempt to remount the high horse of prior success, Swans pulled round the Grand National tent screens, shot their template in the head and rode off on the back off something a great deal more aggressive.
Tighter, dronier, more angular and more discordant, the fourteen year break seemed something of a gestation period, allowing the band to bottle up all of the emotions and anger, only to unleash them in one great big guttural scream. That same scream has now lasted three albums and the band is yet to break for breath.
Once treading the lines along sludge, goth, and all manner of genres with the ‘post-’ prefix, Swans have still not settled. For now, it is reductive enough to just describe their output as ‘experimental’ though there are few better tags. When a band uses a crying baby as an album cover, all bets are off.
Last year the band released To Be Kind, one of the best reviewed albums of 2014. Despite the added weight of reunion expectation, the clamouring of new and intrigued fans, the turn towards the degenerative, distortion and drones, and the absence of anything resembling sunlight and smiles, the band has been more popular and better received than ever before. They have backed this up with a fantastic live presence.
Adding gongs, pipes, fuzz pedals, and bitterness, gigs such as their upcoming show at the Roundhouse on May 21 are a live example of why beating a dead horse sometimes sounds spectacular. Where other bands might have bottled their comeback, Swans have shown they are stronger than ever before.
Swans are the poster boys for rock music reunions. While many reformed bands look back wistfully on how popular they used to be, Michael Gira has managed to surge relentlessly forward. This is not a reunion, but a reconstruction.
By abandoning nostalgia and embracing their own pent up aggression, this incantation of Swans are better than ever before. Rather than allowing them to pass you by, get along to the gig and allow yourself to be subjected to the best example of the best way of coping with all your rage.
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