Swans again....

I hope that calling Swans’ music during the 1980s isn’t just a pretentious afterthought, an attempt to claim that they were a better band before anyone else had heard of them. Video footage of them from the Tube shows a group of callow youth, as ridiculous as many of the Goth rockers who were crowding the independent charts with tales of woe.

Although I wouldn’t happily listen to any of the albums made in this period now– they are deliberately violent, slow and grinding – they represented a harsh attack on the disposability of rock and pop. Slowed down and turned up loud, Swans were against melody, against inclusion, against poetry. Time is Money and A Screw wallowed in the extremes of human nature, against a soundtrack that evoked collapsing new buildings and the grinding mechanics of industrial processes.

Gira’s literary musings had the same fascination with death and sexual degradation. When he looked beyond the self – as in the title track of Cop, there was no social commentary, only the recognition that violence was ingrained in the law. Whether playing the dominant (A Screw) or the submissive (Coward), Gira seemed accepting, almost bored, of the horror.

The ugliness of this music – the faltering beat, the relentless slabs of noises – pushed at what could be achieved within the format of rock. Amplification wasn’t simply a given, it was pushed to extremes. The lively, youthful energy of rock, which was evident even in those angry post-punks and made the sneer of No Wave bracing and even fun, was replaced by a distressing and ponderous power. This was an important questioning of music’s potential, rejecting both the formality of classical experimentation and the playfulness of the rock’n’roll legacy.

Gira was too canny to get caught in a cycle of ‘louder, slower.’ Coinciding with the addition of singer Jarboe, he began to experiment with dynamic range. Side project Skin (later World of Skin) even re-imagined Cry Me a River and utilised softer textures, lining the band up alongside gothic musicians without leaping into their romantic defeatism or supernatural preoccupations. On Children of God, a double album, Gira unveiled a more sophisticated Swans, capable of ambiguous hymns, poetic interludes and complicated meditations on the nature of faith.

http://www.twoism.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=176507&sid=8a9f6add4eb60271ea6cbb3b82dc8e36

The ‘important’ recordings have not aged well – like any avant-garde art, they retain their mystique through their context, not their immediacy. After compression allowed bands to make everything louder, and nu-metal introduced thuggish noise to the pop charts, it is difficult to imagine how forceful Swans once sounded. 

Their contemporaries – Sonic Youth, Big Black – reflected a similar pessimism about society (the New York No Wave scene was all about the anguish) and expansive fascination with sheer noise, but retained a connection to rock’s supple traditions. Swans were the most uncompromising of the No Wave bands, but their use of drum machines and analogue recording locate their music in a particular moment.

I was most enthusiastic about Swans when they stopped being important and became almost recognisably a ‘proper rock band.’