Swans keep on truckin'

"blog blog bloggin' up a reader-less storm HAAY HAAAY HAAAY HAY YEARH"

This ^ has been violently assaulting my psyche to the melody of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door". But like, the Guns 'N' Roses version, not the Bob Dylan one, so it's smothered in Axl's "holy shit that can't be serious" vocal cadence. I don't know why I didn't realize that Guns N' Roses' version wasn't the original until recently, but it probably has to do with the fact that the Dylan version was released in the swamp of bullshit betwixt Nashville Skyline and Blood On The Tracks. That, and the fact that the cover version was so omnipotent throughout my teenage years (not with my consent) that "researching" this shitty band has never really been on the menu.

THE POINT, though, is that I'm trying to write like crazy to get myself back on the train to Selfworthland, so won't you join me through external validation? As a stand in for unweatherable internal validation?

Swans have been a beloved band to moi for ages now, and one who's recent reunion near blew my cynical mind. The fluidity and willingness to grow and change the band has always displayed is baffling, especially when one pulls out cross sections from each era. Try stacking up Cop next to The Burning World and wrapping it up with Soundtracks For The Blind, for example. Still, a 15 year hiatus followed by a new album is pretty much never a good thing, and I figured, while the prospect of hearing the band in action again was tantalizing, the new stuff would almost definitely be a pandering retread or a mere extension/re-titling of The Angels Of Light (not necessarily a bad thing). As it turned out, I was just being an annoying music snob, because not only did the band deliver solid material, but they delivered it from a path they'd never really tread before. 2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky was a much different beast than the overly-experimental, post-rock behemoth they broke up with, and delivered 8 slabs of uncharacteristically raucous, cagey, looping complexity that fell somewhere in the influence field of Glenn Branca and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. The Seer followed it up in 2012 with a monstrous triple LP that pushed the band even further, and here we are two years later with another album clearly stating "NO SRSLY WERE A BAND AGAIN". I mean, I think so. I've only listened to a few tracks on a stream NPR was releasing from it's urethra a few days back.

That said, let's dial back to the album that gave me the official branding of fandom: White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity. If you don't know the story, Swans essentially evolved from a pounding, joyless nightmare of a band cutting right between the industrial and no wave scenes (yet far more singular and artless than either), and found themselves years later filling the unlikely descriptors of "bombastic" and "spiritual". To emphasize the sheer size of this overhaul, you could probably trace back a lot of inspiration in the more deadening, drone-y quadrant of doom/sludge metal to the band's oeuvre from 82-86. Starting with 1985's Greed (and with the enlistment of Jarboe), the band slowly began shifting away from the agonizing, minimalist trudge that characterized earlier discs through a sort of vague, "gothic" augmentation. While not a radical overhaul by any means, it was the first spark that led to 1989, the year the band found themselves signed to a subsidiary of MCA of all places, and went for a full embrace of that aforementioned augmentation, releasing the widely panned The Burning World LP, an unfairly loathed lead weight of a sales figure that lost them a lot of fans. That's where White Light... comes in: the band's "comeback" album they released in 1991 after they were dropped from the label like a potato no one could stand to hold. Likely because it was a registered sexual offender and we are a very Draconian people.

White Light..., to be sure, is one cheesy beast. The production on here is not only immaculate, but so ridiculously expansive, multi-layered and fucking magisterial it could be mistaken for a Phil Spector parody. Beyond that, though, the songs themselves are bombastic, po-faced slabs of REDEMPTION and PAIN - to such an extent you have to wonder whether the band were snickering behind the scenes or actually as deadpan as the music might entail. I know I'm not really selling this for you, but one might benefit from awareness of these attributes before they dive in, especially if you're making any great leaps in the catalog (me, I went from Cop to this, so there were definitely some tilted eyebrow grimaces involved). 

If you can embrace these aspects, however, you're left with some of the greatest Swans material out there. 12 tracks spread over 2 LPs, and I wouldn't say there's a dud among them, and it's every aspect stated above that really pushes this album up the ladder for me. Bright, ethereal keyboards and heavy guitars merge into a dense Wall Of Sound ™/Sheet Of Sound ®, with Gira's big, ridiculous basso profundo voice and Jarboe's near-incomprehensible warbles narrating to the tune of failure, why are we alive, and being better than you, the assaulted listener.

See what I did there? Those are song titles I repurposed as descriptors because I'm always one step ahead of the game of hilarious. Anyway, listen to this triumphant wall of bombast:

Also, does any band have more double-triple LPs than Swans? Seriously, there are, like, ten. This is one of the best, though, so if you happen to like shelling out tremendous amounts of cash, even the CD version of this will likely run you 50 bucks.