Swans - A Screw

In the 80s, Swans went through various forms of horrible music; starting with the fuckfest of jazz and no wave, then somehow mutating to dirgy, percussion heavy, bass guitar driven nightmares. With the album Cop, Swans added real distorted guitar into the mix and created something more musical yet still epically heavy, and thus instantly inventing Godflesh and a hundred other bands in the process. In the remaining gap between that period and Swans becoming a much calmer beast with Children of God, the band pursued a strange electronic direction. Equally as visceral and crushing as earlier efforts, but with an almost pop sensibility laughing at you from the edges of the songs.

When the record starts, you get a pretty unobtrusive beat and a bog standard bass line that doesn't sound threatening at all. And it's not like the song builds or gets heavier, what happens is a rare case of mood changing so subtly within a song, accompanied by minimal instrumentation changes. All of sudden Michael Gira is groaning about (presumably) stuffing dollar bills down the throat of a hooker and things seem a lot different to what they were mere moments ago. In a split second, that unobtrusive beat is grinding your soul to pieces and the bog standard bass line is making you feel horrible, horrible vibes. It bashes your skull to smithereens in all it's lo-fi glory. It is dirty, yet so clinically executed and machine-like that it covers both ends of a very jarred and weird spectrum and puts you in a place that only early Swans can put you in.

 

The pounding beat is like a timekeeper to some seriously perverse fucking. It makes you want to get on a plane to Amsterdam's red light district, find the youngest, most innocent and naive looking girl there and give her a cold, hard, perfunctory pumping over her sink until she starts to fucking cry. I wish I was joking*. Early Swans is a drug that should be taken with extreme caution, and this k.422 pressing of A Screw, along with the pressing of Time Is Money (Bastard), are two of the most challenging and disturbing pieces of music ever written.

(*disclaimer: I am joking)