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.
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.
