Ever onwards through collecting the Swans discography! Ever onwards....
Unfortunately, Can't Find My Way Home is one of the weaker tracks off the somewhat-hated The Burning World album (and a cover song to boot), so this single doesn't really do anything for me in that respect. It is merely a completists item for me, as I go on to collect at least one version of every release Swans have put out. I have the 7" version here, although there is a 12" version of this single in existence, which I believe possesses yet another extra track.
The b-side here though, is a cripplingly-weak acoustic re-working of "(She's A) Universal Emptiness", which is one of my favourite tracks off The Burning World. This version, is for some godforsaken reason, sped up in tempo, and not only sounds rushed, but loses it's depressive and brooding feeling.
To briefly conclude; this release offers nothing to the Swans discography in any way, and is entirely a completists item. I do not recommend purchasing it to anyone, anywhere.
This simple little CD housed in a tray insert can sell for up to £140 on Discogs, which is, in all honestly, absolutely fucking retarded. I'd always had it marked down as another piece of Michael Gira discography that I could never get because of silly hipsters with too much time and money on/in their hands. I could have kissed the merch guy at the recent Jarboe gig in Bristol when I saw this little gem shining out of a maze of various Jarboe records. I felt like a bit of a dick going to a Jarboe show and leaving with only a Swans t-shirt and a Michael Gira CD (hahaha) but hey...she was selling them!
The quality on this CD isn't the best in the world, I will be honest. You can even hear people talking over the mix. I don't really know the story behind the need for Jarboe's "emergency medical fund" but it looks like to me that Gira rounded up a bunch of his music-making pals for a gig in New York to raise a bunch of money; a quest that was furthered by the release of this CD. It is my understanding that a lot of the musicians here went on to become involved in The Angels of Light (and the resurrected incarnation of Swans in the form of Phil Puleo), and that results in some interesting live versions of classic Gira/Swans songs. "God Damn The Sun" sounds particularly haunting with an Angles of Light vibe, it's just a shame it's spoilt by beret-wearing (a wild assumption) pricks who feel the need to talk through fucking gigs.
I will end with simply saying that I don't think there's any need to buy this unless your a Swans/Gira/Jarboe super-fan or a collector hell-bent on getting all their stuff. I'm just happy I managed to get it for a reasonable £10, although to be honest I didn't really need to pay that to be reminded of how much I hate cunts talking over music.
This little remix EP accompanied the release of the Love of Life album by Swans back in 1992. It makes things a touch confusing whilst researching online as both 12"s have the same title. It takes two tracks from that record, and pairs them alongside "long versions", which are essentially drawn-out, more atmospheric takes on the classic original tracks. This "single" isn't particularly rare, but at the same time it isn't very easy to find either. I know that doesn't make much sense, but don't expect these to fall off trees. Despite this, you can still get it fairly cheap (expect to pay around a minimum of £15). I found my copy buried in amongst all the crap at Kelly's Records in Cardiff market, much to my delight. This will eventually go inside my Love of Life black box set, which to date is still missing a record (White Light). When I get a copy of White Light I'll do a separate review for that as well and then do the Love of Life album review + box set overlook in another post, probably as something special like the 1000th post or something.
The title track remix doesn't really offer much, just drawing out the track a bit more and adding a weird funk to it, as well as a strange dance beat. When it kicks in proper, it has more time to unfold that the 3-minutes-or-so album version, but it does get a bit repetitive after 6 minutes. The "Amnesia" remix however is totally brilliant. It takes the drum pattern and extends it, filling the void with hellish screams, horns, mysterious sounds and Jarboe's haunting vocals. The original version of "Amnesia" is so short and to the point for a Swans song, so this creepy atmospheric version definitely feels more like the real thing!
Both remixes were done by a guy called Martin Bisi, who runs a recording studio in New York with Bill Laswell (the guy who produced The Burning World), and the 12" was put out by Gira's own label, Young God Records. You check out both extended remix tracks below. Get in!
This is probably the one release in Swans history that is looked down upon the most. As with The Burning World, Gira has retrospectively scorned this release, and insists that the cover was a mistake. Think what you will, but I think it's pretty good. I'm not too fussed on the black version (sung by Jarboe) but the red version with Gira on vocals is a great cover of a fantastic song.
I'm still gonna get the black version (only available on 12") because I'm a Swans mega-fan and that version also includes an acoustic version of "New Mind", which kills. Bitchin'. Now sit back and enjoy this video of the heaviest band in the world absolutely destroying their self image and credibility In the 80s/early 90s I imagine Swans releasing a video for this raised a pretty fucking negative reaction.
Soundtracks for the Blind is often hailed as something incredibly special in the original Swans catalogue. After spending the majority of the 90s focussing on much more softer material, Swans' issued a perplexing final death rattle with this double album. Listening to it, even from the first few opening seconds, evokes deep feelings of sadness for me, even though I never got into the band until they reformed three years ago. This record was literally everything the band had left before they quit. There are a few full-band songs in here, but the majority of the two discs is made up of sound collages by Gira and Jarboe. Some of them are tests of patience, sure, but for the most part they are extremely efficient and poignant passages of noise, ambience or atmosphere to rival any long-term artists in this field.
As a whole, Soundtracks for the Blind is an absolute mammoth task to try and conquer in one go. You really do get your money's worth here. Both discs are crammed full, and the total running length for the entire album is nearly two and a half hours long. Even with the recent release of The Seer, I believe that Soundtracks is by far the most "out-there" thing that Swans have ever done. It's creepy, moving and downright edgy, and leaves you with that sinking feeling you get in your chest after looking at old photographs or something. Due to the sheer volume of ambient tracks here, when the full band finally kicks in it is infinitely more impressive. Most of the band tracks last easily between 10 and 15 minutes, a scary decade-plus long ago look at what was to come in the future, and also a downright perplexing move for a band that had spend the previous seven years or so peddling acoustic-driven four-minuters like it was nobody's business. I mean, just compare this record to the album before it (The Great Annihilator); such startling change continues to puzzle me to this very day.
Couple that with the fact that a few of the songs here scarily pre-date the stylings of the post rock explosion ("Helpless Child" and "The Sound" as examples) and you really have an absolute relic of a record that must be cherished until the end of time. Its length makes it almost impossible to market commercially, its content relating to neither the brutal Swans of old or the soft Swans of the 90s, and it was released at a time when it would be seen as a statement along the lines of "This is all we have left of any worth. This should have been the future, but it is all you are getting". If I had been a Swans fanatic in the 90s then I would have torn this record apart and analysed every single second of it. I'm so fucking glad Swans reformed. So. Fucking. Glad. Out on Young God Records.
If you have a spare 2 hours and 22 minutes why not give the entire album a listen right here. What do you have to gain expect complete and total enlightenment?
In my quest to own all Swans shit I endeavor to pick up all the singles as 12"s, with the exception of New Mind as the 12" doesn't really offer me anything for the increased price. For the singles that follow, a lot of alternate versions / exclusive tracks occupy the B-side, but with New Mind all the 7" gets is a shorter version of what's on the 12" B-side. And that is actually a good thing, because we get the lush Jarboe track "I'll Swallow You" without the crappy remixed "New Mind" intro. Straight to the point! The whole 12" version appears as the final track on any repress of Children of God anyway, so I've heard it and own it and it's fucking crap. Also, as a note, the version of "New Mind" here is cut down to just under four minutes.
This marks the first time in fuuuuuuck knows how long I've actually paid full retail price for a CD (by that I mean £9 or higher) but it is just impossible to get the career-end late 90s Swans stuff anywhere any cheaper (in Britain, at least). Swans Are Dead is a retrospective live album, released not that long after their original demise, and features two discs of live performances. 1995-1997 was an interesting time for Swans, having gone full circle through the spectrum of non-threatening genres, the band were on the verge of returning to their downright weird and extremely experimental ways when they abruptly ended. The mega-oversized Soundtracks of the Blind amply documents this, and Swans Are Dead is the live album for that era that accompanies it.
There are two discs, one is a show from '95 and the other from '97, and despite this they flow pretty well and I originally thought when I downloaded it that it was the same show spread on both discs. It's even a different line up and I didn't realise - perhaps I'm losing my touch? Or would that be my hearing? Anyway, Swans Are Dead showcases the band's very experimental final tour and is a slice of a place in time that was once very sad and nostalgic. Now that Swans have reformed however, the Are Dead set hasn't lost any meaning; the Swans here is unlike any other period in the band's lucid history so it still stands up with the rest of the catalog, even today. Out on Young God Records.
Hmmm, this is going to be a controversial one for me. I don't know how I can write about this without being downright horrible about one of my favorite bands of all time. Hard Times. Fuck it, here it goes. Burning World is Swans' sixth album, and marked the final nail in the coffin for the early days of audible hell. Industrialists, grinders, artfags and noise nerds dropped their support for this band in fucking droves the moment The Burning World hit the shelves, and it's very easy to see why. Even compared to the tamer-than-usual sound of fifth album Children of God, The Burning World is a hundred thousand miles away from anything Cop or Filth. Gone are the dirging bass rhythms, the relentless and pounding drums, the hellish and fucking loathsome lyrics! In are all the acoustic guitars in the world, a plethora of studio session musicians, a major label budget and THAT Johnny Cash crooning. Yikes!
And thus began a period in the history of Swans that both Jarboe and Mr. Gira like to pretend didn't happen. In retrospect, Gira admits to "loathe" The Burning World, and he even repressed the two albums to follow it on a compilation called Various Failures. You think he's trying to tell us something? The fact that he didn't repress The Burning World for fucking aeons also cements the fact that he hates this record, and even when he did so in the compilation form of Forever Burned, the pressing number was significantly lesser than all the other Swans re-issues. Following "gay" Swans records White Light... and Love of Life went on to achieve something of a cult status (I personally think Love of Life is spectacular) but The Burning World sank like a stone and for the most part remains in the depths of the music world where nobody gives a shit about it.
I've seen this and the CD version go for some ridiculous prices online so when I saw it for like £15 on Discogs I snapped it up, mainly because I am a massive Swans fan boy and simply must get every single record (I cringe at the day I have to fucking buy The Great Annihilator which is by far their worst output), and in all honesty, it started to grow on me. I don't really know why, because it is a shameless, major label funded, Bill Laswell fueled try-hard attempt to break into the mainstream, but I gotta say, The Burning World has a few great songs. If the tribal drumming aspects of "Mona Lisa Mother Earth" aren't good then I might as well be deaf, "Universal Emptiness" is far more impressive that similar-sounding depressed cunts The Smiths and "Saved" is the best song in the world for describing my life. I don't deserve it, but I'm Saved.
Until the disappointing chorus kicks in, "Jane Mary, Cry One Tear" builds and builds in such an epic fashion, with heart-wrenchingly depressing lyrics, and closer "God Damn The Sun" has gone on to become a Gira acoustic classic. It is the only track on this album that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It is purely one of the most goddamn fuckin' miserable things I have ever heard. Even though Swans changed just about everything to do with their sound, the same themes remained. Okay, it's not quite "push your ass up / cry / open your mouth / here's your money / cry / this feels good" or "somebody weaker than you should rape you, bastard" but the lyrics still center around demons, loss, death, depression and apparent incomprehensible self loathing. I think then, we can forgive the mighty Swans this one hiccup! Long live the crushing monster!
I've been anticipating the review of this monster for a very long time; it has been nagging away at the back of my mind since I heard the album a few months ago. I almost wrote the review on the mp3 files I heard, but I pressured myself into waiting for the actual finished product, and boy am I glad that I did! The Seer is an absolute fucking monster of a record, and is by far the longest record I own at nearly 2 hours in length (I think it even outruns Bitches Brew by Miles Davis, although I could be wrong on that account so don't quote me on that). Swans have come literally leaps and bounds from My Father... that was released in 2010; literally, unexplainable progressiveness in such a short time is quite frankly mind boggling! But, that is what Swans have always done (for better or worse) and will most likely continue to do, should they ever somehow manage to figure out how to top this record for sheer ambition.
I got this excellent triple LP package directly from Young God Records on pre-order, and what a fantastic package it is, almost rivalling Boris & Sunn O)))'s Altar collaboration in terms of sheer shininess (although nothing quite beats Southern Lord shininess). The entire thing folds out like a rectangular snake, each partition holding a new record full of experimental, post rock-cum-noise madness, or a poster, or a download card, or a live dvd of an entire Swans performance. To top it off, the thing is signed on the back by the man himself, Mr. Michael Gira; the ringmaster in this circus of lunacy. Swans has had it's fair share of musicians, but it has always been about centring on Gira, and to an extent Westberg and Jarboe, but for once Gira doesn't shadow over as the "leader" (although he is that, if you get what I'm trying to say); the band is whole; each performer is bringing an equal amount to the table here. Phil Puleo and Thor's dual percussion attack is the defining backbone to the modern era Swans sound, and Christoph Hahn's oft-redneck-as-fuck slide guitar is fucking awesome as fucking fuck. I now want a slide guitar. The remaining two guitarist and one bassist flesh out the monumental cacophony almost perfectly, leaving Gira's baritone to lazily (or crazily) echo over the top of the whole lot of it almost like the icing on a rather large and weird cake. Oh, and Jarboe is back, if only for two songs.
It will take you several listens to even comprehend what-the-actual-fuck is going on here; "The Apostate" and "A Piece of the Sky" are both at the twenty minute mark, "The Seer" itself is just over thirty minutes, and "The Seer Returns" lulls on for another six, bringing the title track experience to nearly forty minutes. That's an hour and twenty for those four tracks alone, and you got a whole bunch of other tracks to comprehend on top of that! My only irk is that with the vinyl version the track list runs in a totally different order, and that all three of the massive tracks are split onto different sides of vinyl. With "The Seer" I can understand why for quality reasons, the title track and it's afterthought "The Seer Returns" (which is the original version of "The Seer", for those who've not heard the demos on We Rose From Your Bed...) takes up a whole disc in itself. But, I cannot understand why the two twenty minuters are split; they could easily take up a side each and not have to be broken up.
I could literally write on about this album for longer than it's actual duration so I'm going to round this off now. The Seer is a maddeningly ambitious record that will, without doubt, send you through various stages of insanity whilst trying to listen to the whole thing in one go. It is set to more than likely split the Swans fan base in two (again), and if I am totally honest a record of this gargantuan length does have a few dull moments (opener "Lunacy" springs to mind) but the longer, more progressive tracks more than make up for it. Give the track below a chance, and if you can stomach it, download / buy and love it forever!
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.
This is an extremely collectable Swans "bootleg" of live performances recording during the supporting tour for the seminal album Children of God, pressed on double 12". It was actually recorded for the band by Jack Balchin, the band's sound engineer at the time, using just a Sony Walkman, and was originally marketed as a bootleg to save any hassle with record labels. Feel Good Now doesn't quite live up to the total aural destruction of previous live albums such as Real Love or Public Castration is a Good Idea, but it is still an interesting document of swans history.
To the casual Swans fan and / or general observer, the tracks here are nothing more than just badly recorded live versions of songs from Children of God. Check the link below to see what I mean. That being said, it would be silly to consider this record anything but a completist's item for hardcore Swans fanboys such as myself. The cheapest I've seen this go for on Discogs is around £30, but I fluked my copy on a no-reserve eBay auction for just £3.20. What a steal! Granted, my copy doesn't include the tour poster but it is a small price to pay for such a great bargain!
