SWANS- part1

'Perhaps that's one reason why the group feel as potent now as ever, thirty years after first forming and at a time (like back then) when dividing lines are again being drawn across society to maintain a toxic status quo. That drive to create states of shared ecstasy feels like at least one small sonic riposte to austerity: Swans as a joyful collective fuck-you in the face of divide-and-rule politics.'
The Quietus (review of To Be Kind)

I divide the career of Swans into four distinct eras. The earliest stage is when they were important: from the first release through Cop, Time is Money to Children of God. This last album marked the change in emphasis. Up to this point, Swans had been about the noise, the violence, the brutally slow crawl. This was their important phase because they were pushing at the boundaries of music, testing what happened when musical forms were plunged into deep freeze. The audience got to experience extremes of volume. Gira painted a picture of a godless universe, filled with BDSM loving authority figures, and their willing victims. 



Children of God instituted and suggested phase two: the ecstatic Swans. Showing an interest in a more ambiguous relationship to power, and adding more of the lyrical light that female vocalist Jarboe offered, CoG had orchestration, and dabbled with dynamics in a more nuanced way. A brief major label interlude (The Burning World, which Gira abjures and does sound rather like one of producer Bill Laswell's world music appropriations) led to a pair of albums (White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life) that applied a sophisticated musical vocabulary to Gira's energetic assaults on reality. The band displayed more of their influences - the Pink Floyd references are audible in the ambition and the shuddering grooves - and were less important in terms of exploding musical possibility. But there were listenable. 

The third era was what came after this, until the band split up, and then reformed. It represents the years that I stopped listening. The later Swans' albums seemed to be caught up in the band's past, never sure whether they wanted to be 'the important' band of the 1980s (which was less important now that Big Loud Bands were in the charts) or the second stage experimental psychedelic warriors. 

The final stage is after 2010, when Gira revived the band (or brand. It's just him and his friends, really). Given the ferocious work rate Gira has discovered, it is possible that the come-back will have its own stages. The quotation from The Quietus above sums up the joy being felt by many people at this return. 

It is a joy I find impossible to share.