Swans part 4

It is easy to understand why I had no interest in Angels of Light. Rightly or wrongly, I associated them with the Americana groups that emerged during the late 1990s. Around the same time as I was enjoying Love of Life, I started clubbing more seriously.

I've been arguing with my old school pal Ian Grant about this. Apart from being just about the only football writer I care to read, Ig was my youthful companion in adoring the Swans. It is his positivity about the revival that forces me to acknowledge… well, not that I am wrong, but subjective.  I do believe that appreciation of art depends a great deal on the personality of the critic. The mesh of me and Swans is no longer as tight as it was, and what I wanted from music is being provided by other media now.

I think that I have always demanded that art offers me alternatives – different visions of the world. This might excuse my faddish enthusiasm for African jit-jive in the late 1980s, or my chasing of intelligent electronica during the rave years. My dislike for The Streets is grounded in distaste for the ordinariness of his music and words.

Swans were alternative, and were probably my first taste of the uncanny. Being an X-Men fan means I knew what the word meant before I knew what it implied. The uncanny is sublime, terrifying,  out of place, other, surreal, intense, an awareness of my place in the universe, and the immensity of that universe.

By 1993, the uncanny was playing out in the beats of drum’n’bass, in the glacial soundscapes of The Aphex Twin, and echoing in the Kronos Quartet’s re-appropriations of the string quartet. I didn't need Swans to provide it.

Other bands seemed to be following Gira’s lead – Godspeed You Black Emperor did the majestic orchestration thing, Mogwai’s early albums made challenges on rock’s predictable use of the guitar.

When Gira reformed Swans, I wasn't that interested. Even now, that first ‘come back’ album has little to hold me. It sounds loose, unstructured and more of a rebranding of Angels of Light. This would change when I saw Gira do his solo set, and I heard The Seer.

The Seer was extravagant and exciting – and went beyond what Swans had been. Like Love of Life given a contemporary production, it seemed to laugh at the bands that had been influenced by Swans and add in a relentless sophistication, of muscular beats and sinewy melodies. I was back in.

Swans part 3

Having spent around a decade proving that rock’n’roll was noise pollution – it is rumoured that their PA was once dismantled by health and safety officers – Swans slapped their audience in the face with an album of folk inflected beauty.

Gira has more or less disowned The Burning World and it remains their most uncharacteristic set. A cover version of Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home, the jaunty single Saved (a more positive reading of spirituality) and a cast of musicians invited by producer Bill Laswell revealed not only a band more comfortable in their skins, but Gira’s rich baritone. A solo show in Glasgow for the Counterflows Festival would prove that, shorn of noise, Gira is an accomplished singer-songwriter, capable of turning the acoustic guitar into a weapon and allowing space for lyricism and vocals that would impress Leonard Cohen: and this tool is most audible on The Burning World.

Once again, context reveals much. At the time of The Burning World, music from Africa and the Middle East was emerging in the alternative charts (Ofra Haza, who turned out to be a fairly middle-of-the-road star in her homeland, was gaining coverage for her Yemenite Songs, and WOMAD was kicking off). The Burning World caught that spirit.

Gira’s displeasure at the album – it was their only release on a major label – might have fuelled the pair of albums that followed: White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life. Keeping some of the ‘ethnic’ influences, but hooking them to a more visceral beat and less optimistic lyrics, Swans pulled on psychedelic influences to become a dazzling assault.

Live, the band seemed to  chase something elusive yet physical: the way that the band is now described is a better fit for their live performances in the early 1990s, when the rattle of noise was matched by glorious harmonies and swooping moments  of majesty. Jarboe was providing a vocal counterpoint to Gira’s intensity, and the drones (three guitars and keyboards unified) had a polyphonic depth. And lyrically, Gira was finding a compromise between the early sparseness and a poetic vocabulary that evoked the universes of love and destruction that the music suggested.

It’s difficult to understand why I lost interest after this period. I remember finding The Great Annihilator on vinyl, and thinking it was an uneasy mixture of the important period and the ecstatic period. The title sounded like a parody of Swans’ previous fascination with extremity (it is named after that big black hole that is going to devour the universe, eventually).

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.’

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.

Swans 2012 @ The Arches

LIVE REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SKINNY 21 NOVEMBER 2012

Michael Gira's ambitions for this particular live incarnation of Swans are not modest: the set clocks in at around two hours and from the gentle opening – atmosphere drones backing Gira's affecting baritone – to the tumultuous finale, the band chase a shamanic ferocity. But they never quite achieve that ineffable ecstasy, offering moments of brutality (the revisiting of 1980s A Coward is concise terror), galloping joy (The Seer itself) and stretch where they struggle to rise above The Arches' difficult sound. 

Support Sir Richard Bishop is overshadowed by the expectation of Swans: his acoustic strumming follows the experimental Americana (folky but with eastern sounding motifs and a drone sensitivity) introduced by John Fahey in the 1960s. It connects to Swans' interest in folk instrumentation and the extended yet focused improvisation. In some ways, Swans' set is a more orchestrated version of Bishop's musical quest, replacing the precision of his picking with a layered majesty.

Swans, however, are at the mercy of The Arches' idiosyncratic acoustics. Some parts of the room reduce the crunch of the bass to a buzz – elsewhere, a treble hiss distracts from the full tilt attack of the guitars. Many of the more improvised passages reach a monotonous glory, an emphatic and almost spiritual energy, occasionally descending into self-indulgence. The precision of A Coward or the dynamic pulse of The Seer make it clear that this line-up can reach Gira's vision – tonight, an inconsistency creeps in, leaving them sporadically exciting.

Swans -The Musical

I am usually okay for jukebox musicals - I have quite enough on my plate without a side-serving of paper-thin plots and orchestral versions of once vital pop songs. However, I am not sure whether to believe these rumours, that Michael Gira has agreed to Public Castration: The Musical based on Swans' career.

The early signs are intriguing: the show explores the adventures of a city business-man who is dragged into a sleazy underworld of BDSM sex and religion. Beginning with a set-piece based around Time is Money (Bastard), the designer has talked of a design based around Metropolis, the script works its way through four acts towards a mass finale of Children of God.

Other songs slated for inclusion are A Screw, Raping A Slave and Coward. The entire third act is dedicated to a medley of songs from the album Greed - for many people, the finest incarnation of the band, on the cusp of becoming more melodic after years of grinding monotony. A leaked video suggested that the choreography is a combination of classic Fosse style moves and puppetry.  

Heroes...

In the past month, I have attended concerts by two of my heroes: Philip Jeck – mainly because of his Vinyl Requiem – and Michael Gira in Swans. Neither gig was as ecstatic as I might have hoped. In both cases, the live experience did not expand on my joy in their recorded output.

In many ways, Swans are easier to understand: it is clear that their live sets chase the ecstasy and the limitations of the venue’s sound – and a slight discomfort caused by the ritual of the gig, in which the audience are reduced to spectators – undermined the ferocious assault. 

There were moments of sheer brilliance: an unexpected version of A Coward proved that Swans’ latest incarnation can be as hard-hitting as Gira’s earlier line-ups, and there were several improvised moments when the guitars, and percussion combined towards a monumental majesty. Gira himself, reveling in his new, confident baritone, was appropriately messianic and my subjective experience was clearly not shared by the entire audience. The sheer volume, the interludes of droning distorting, the energetic runs driven by the twin drummers: even on what was not a perfect night, Swans are proving that there is an alternative to the nostalgia circuit.

Philip Jeck is harder to assess. In a triple bill of experimental musicians, his analogue approach stood out. The use of vinyl lends his performance a rougher, human edge (later, Thomas Koner would evoke landscapes that dwarf human scale, much like an icier vision of Swans’ scope). Yet, having worked with dancers and creating installations like the Vinyl Requiem, Jeck’s solo is oddly introverted. He builds layers of sound through adding recordings and even rolls out a few bass lines that sound fresh from a John Carpenter horror flick.

If he never quite reaches the scale of Koner, he does use his drones in a familiar, almost friendly manner. The awkwardness of vinyl makes the tunes distort under pressure – at times, the tone evokes a lost radio transmission. Yet the live dimension adds little.

While Swans battle the elements – and there were few moments of boredom and plenty of potential – it makes sense for Gira to tour. But for Jeck, the nature of his music seems more comfortable in a recorded format. Gira aims to be shamanic, ramping up the traditional rock egotism into something spiritual, while Jeck is tinkering with idea that are as immediate experienced in a solitary cell. There are two forms of mysticism at work – which explains why these characters became my heroes in my teenage years. One is liberatory, expansive, feeding on nature and the moment. The other is scholarly, monastic.

                                                                                                             

My Life with Swans (2)

The arrival of Children of God was the culmination of Gira's experimentation with different genres. But whereas his earlier albums had applied the logic of Cop across different musical forms (A Screw was a version of dance music), Children of God explored orchestration to integrate the influences. Jarboe's voice was variously seductive or a backing choir to Gira's increasingly confident baritone. Before disappearing into the ambiguous sunset with the title track, Gira wrestled with desire, salvation and despair - the penultimate track, Blind Love would be later worked into an extended, ballistic bolero, an agonised dissection of a man struggling not to be dissolved by passion.

When it turned up in Watford, it changed my life. Not only was the music ambitious - it was satisfyingly aggressive and harsh, but demonstrated a sophisticated use of dynamics and mood - the lyrics demanded serious discussion. New Mind might have had the character of an exceptionally zealous puritan ("the sex in your soul will damn you to hell") but the ambiguity of tone, caused by the sparse, tense language opened it up to further consideration. The alternation of nice (yet sinister) and vicious (yet earnest) throughout the four sides pushed Swans beyond the generic post-punk album, which tended to rattle through at a great pace, pause for an emotional number, then hit the same urgent stride to finish.

Swans were slow, but never descended into sludge. The beat was measured, the force and confidence of Gira's music impressive and complete.

The earliest Swans' albums, I had found out in retrospect, were unashamedly masculine. Gira might have been frustrated at the band's reputation and behaviour of some fans, but a series of albums that obsessed around violence tends to lead to consequences. On Children of God, Gira widens his interests. It's easy to claim that Jarboe's presence had given them a more feminine side, but Gira was simply using whatever techniques he could find. As the nuance of Trust Me transforms his earlier dominant personae from sociopath to preacher, Children of God's range of influences evolves Swans into a more complete entity.

Perhaps most importantly, for all the sermons contained therein, Children of God did not preach a message. Earlier post-punk attempts to discuss religion (thanks, Crass, for really loving up to your name) were predictable polemics. Gira's genius was to simply reflect the manner of American evangelists, resetting their words against musical tornados. There's no attempt to catalogue Christianity's failings, or assess theological truth claims.

Children of God is an album about the way religious language is used.

Swans: A Personal History. Part The First: BIG SLABS OF NOISE

Despite the lies I often tell, I did not get into the Swans in their earliest incarnations. The journey began for me with Children of God, part of a trinity of American rock albums (the other two were Sister by Sonic Youth and Big Black's Atomiser) that weaned me from the light independent rock of my teenage years, and opened me up to a more artistic, experimental music.

A heavy double album, apparently investigating the history of Christianity but stopping off for tours around desperate sexual yearning and gardens of lost innocence, Children of God marked the transition of Michael Gira's muse from an unrepentant masculine aggression to a more textured palette. Gira's brooding voice was off-set by Jarboe's seductive, feminine whisper and the concluding track refused to condemn or celebrate a religion that was, in the late 1980s, encountering serious problems coping with modernity.

Within a few years, the pastoral tones of Jarboe's tracks would dominate on The Burning World but until then, there was a back catalogue to explore.

The earliest versions of the band - as their wikipdia entry points out, few members have remained consistently except for Gira himself - moved from being a relatively recognisable version of No Wave towards something more monumental and unique. The production values of 1980s studios limits their impact against contemporary noise units - even Slipknot can capture a similar immensity now - yet, at the time, and well into the twenty-first century, they had a reputation for being the loudest band in the world. This reputation was cemented by Gira's antics on-stage. Even by the time of Children of God, Gira was still practically fighting his audiences, and environmental health officers would express concern about their volume.

As a completist, I ended up with vinyl versions of Filth and their debut EP: neither album hints at a band who would have such a long career or find a distinctive voice. It's Cop, Young God and Raping a Slave that stand out: grinding, slow, topped by offensive lyrics that picture a New York inhabited by corrupt officials and sociopaths: sex becomes another act of violence and the self is merely yet another murderous trap. The musical preoccupations of the minimal riff at loud volume, the slow, relentless drumming, the human voice tiny and despairing in the welter of noise are mirrored by the word.

For a teenager seeking rebellion, Gira's vision of a world in thrall to demonic passions, bleached of pleasure and offering no release was transfixing. Given his later fascination with religious imagery, it is not unfair to say that the narrative contained within these three releases was the most pessimistic representation of reality since Gnosticism fell out of fashion. If indie-rock was a chronicle of the small town blues, Swans had a cosmic depression.

These themes are followed through into Holy Money and Greed. Unlike Cop, these albums has aged less gracefully. Probably because Gira was becoming more experimental, the forays into deep freezed funk or the first introduction of acoustic instruments sound dated. The drum machines, for example, sound tinny and inappropriate to the overall caustic noise. Where Cop was single-minded and exact, Holy Money applied the Swans' template across genres, crushing them all into monolithic slabs of rage.

At the time, I was utterly thrilled. In retrospect, I didn't quite understand how Gira was using soulless sex as a metaphor for political and social disgust. Nor did I recognise the problems that Swans' musical ambitions presented to a band wanting to escape the simplistic responses of an audience that shouted "louder, slower" at them.

After all, I knew where these experiments were leading - to Children of God. They were missives from a divine source, field reports on a universe I could not understand. And as I grew in education and pretension, here was a band that demanded to be taken seriously. The sound might have been visceral, but the content remained open to interpretation, discussion.

Footnote to Incomplete Essay: My transformation from music fan to dance fan

The transition of my enthusiasm from music to theatre came, perhaps, in part, as a consequence of two remarkable gigs that I saw in the 1990s: Swans, touring on the back of their Love of Life album and The Young Gods around the time of TV Sky. Both bands conjured a mixture of furious violence and triumphant ecstasy, invoking a shamanistic mysticism (Swans' Michael Gira manipulates a theological vocabulary while The Young Gods embrace a lyrical paganism) that transformed the rock gig from a tired ritual into a celebration of life and community.

Against this, the business-as-usual of most rock'n'roll appeared tired and predictable: bands playing their hits to a group of fans who would sing along, or younger groups searching for an audience in half-empty basements, lacked the raw energy and the musical confidence Gira and Frans Treichler embodied. Memories of Michael Clark's collaboration with The Fall, and the appearance of a company I believe to have been DV8 dancing to Swans on London's South Bank, hinted that there were more interesting ways to experience the thrill of art transmitting beauty and meaning. I still attended gigs - although it was not until I discovered the Glasgow bands on the fringes of the city's visual art scenes that I recaptured the excitement - but even major events like Radiohead's big tent tour felt like shams.

I can date the exact moment when "contemporary dance" replaced rock music as my favourite art: Les Ballets C de la B, Tramway, performing VSPRS. Admittedly, the live band - an amalgam of gypsy and jazz musicians belting out a psychedelic adaptation of Verdi's Vespers - lent the choreography a recognisable rock'n'roll energy, but the terrifying movements of the dancers, the intensity of Alain Platel's intentions and the cast, drawn from the worlds of classical ballet, acrobatics and more difficult to define areas (my subsequent art crush Iona Kewney, who would later develop her own work that followed a similar rough beauty, was a visual artist who had found herself dancing in an attempt to capture her wild muse) did more than illustrate this heretical re-imagination of the seminal religious composition.

I followed the dancers into a trance. In under two hours, Platel fused music and movement - and a stunning, ragged, set - into a contemplation of both the dangers and pleasures of religious ecstasy. Reviewing the critical commentary of the time, it's clear that Les Ballets C de la B were controversial. There is a contempt for their style - they have been mocked as circus performers. But for me, the performance was a revelation: both of dance's ability to represent altered states (and provoke them), and the potential for theatre to be more dramatic, more vital and more vigorous than the supposedly primal energies unleashed by rock'n'roll.

SWANS

Nostalgia makes a mockery of youth's enthusiasm for radical change. Thanks to an accident of history, I experienced several cod-revolutionary musical movements during my youth: the early years of "indie" when it referred not to an insipid soft-rock but to the legion of independent record labels; the rising hopes of the acid house explosion, which ended in legislation against the beat and not a few drug casualties; the surprising rise of grunge rock; the political ambitions of late 1980s hip-hop. I also got to experience the waves of nostalgia for previous moments of popular radicalism: 1986's anniversary celebrations of the Summer of Love; the curious period when Channel 4 decided to define the past as a series of "greatest moments", reducing Bowie's androgyny on Top of the Pops to a memory equal to that of the space-hopper; the jubilee year reprise of punk's longings for an egalitarian society.

All of which makes me old enough to look down on the youngsters today and say that their revolutions are just cosmetic. And sigh in disappointment at the hopes and dreams carried along in the wake of Lady Gaga's number about being born this way.

I don't really have much time for nostalgia. I found the reformation of Public Image Limited depressing - if I want to hear Metal Box, I'll download it. I won't pay money to see the guy out of the advert for butter dress up like a clown and pretend he is still fighting the system. Yet the resurgence of one band, SWANS, has me excited. Not just because I was a huge fan back in the day - their transition from monolithic noise to an exotic folk behemoth mirrored my own maturity from antagonistic teenager to melancholic young adult - but because their return doesn't hark back to a notional past glory. As I remember it, most people hated SWANS in their first incarnation.

Listening back to their early albums - albums I once trawled record stores to find - I understand why. Sure, Cop has an intensity and a plain-speaking ferocity - the title track reduces police brutality to a despairing chant - and the freezing of various musical forms to a juddering crawl is both intelligent and thuggish. But before Children of God, Michael Gira was really just about the shock tactics. The sparsity of the sound - loud, but with minimal content - allowed me to weave my own fantasies into the music. But Raping a Slave is exactly as obnoxious as its title suggests. It's not really an ultra-hip take on the inherent power imbalance in human relationships.

Gira was never an idiot, and he abandoned the Big Bangs for dynamism and nuance. Children of God remains a favourite album, mainly because of the studied neutrality the music and lyrics bring to a controversial topic. The rumours that the double album would deal with the entire history of Christianity weren't far off, and Gira's ambiguity about the divine and organised religion make this a meaningful contribution to the tradition of works inspired by God. Atheists will find plenty of support for their assault on religious morality and certainty, while the themes of sacrifice and the eroticism of Holy Love are palatable for the thoughtful believer.

The following albums pursued Gira's interest in spirituality and exotic sounds. The Burning World was marred by Bill Laswell's production - if he could bring out SWANS' bucolic interludes, he masked their raw power. But White Light From the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life were astonishing: complex orchestration, traditional instruments used like psychedelic guitars, Gira's confidence as a baritone and a marked use of dynamics that was classical in its application. Nobody really gave much of a shit: a similar change in direction from Nick Cave gave the former Birthday Boy a new lease of life. SWANS gradually fell apart and Gira went solo.

Although his Angels of Light project was more popular than SWANS ever were, they lacked something of the band's ferocity and precision. When he reassembled SWANS, I had lost interest but didn't see it as a backwards move. If anything, the subsequent album surprised me by recalling exactly the qualities his recent work had lacked.

And so to the recent solo show by Gira in Glasgow. He suits his older look - the cowboy hat he sports sets him in that long line of American  mavericks who have grown into their music and deny the assumption that rock is a young man's game. His acoustic guitar is more vicious than most band's electrics: the hammering chords encourages spontaneous head-banging, and the single instrument arrangements gave space to his baritone's sinister drawl. It's strange that a simple name change has reignited his passion, but the new SWANS are building on a reputation that grows with the years.

Once upon a time, I longed for a world where SWANS were understood, the whispered intimacies of his SKIN albums were the soundtrack to impossible romances and the masculine aggression of Body to Body, Job to Job were recognised as terse political and social commentary. Now, I find all the early albums unlistenable: not in the way that they were intended, as to be slabs of assaulting noise - frankly, Slipknot can do all that far better, and I don't like Slipknot - but for the rough recording values of the 1980s. Drum machines do not age well.

Perhaps all those failed revolutions took their toll on my idealism, but SWANS today are a more palatable beast. The vitality of the music isn't just an end in itself, but a vehicle for a songwriter who, aging and recognising the flow of time, still has a story to tell.

Cry Parrot, The Arches and Braw Gigs present

Swans

Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls)

Fri 16 Nov 2012 | 7pm-11pm | £17.50 + bf

The Two Best Gigs What I Have Seen

Although I have spent most of the last decade becoming more enthusiastic about the possibilities of dance and theatre (Les Ballet C de la B could have been included in this list for their version of Monteverdi's Vespers even without Platel's choreography), I still believe that music can be the most immediate art. Wagner's Ring Cycle might provide the proverbial "good moments but awful quarter-hours" and electronic music is struggling to find the right format for live performance: rock gigs follow a predictable pattern but even the loose informality of Holy Mountain sets offer moments of chest crushing intensity.

Unfortunately, then, these choices are over a decade old: whether that reflects my senility or reflects a genuine diminution in the power of rock to shock and roll is left open to debate. Undeniably, my commitment to music has diminished. In my teens, these bands shaped my life and my belief in art as a transformative experience. Twenty years of deconstructing my aesthetic tastes has made it more difficult to ignore the context of a concert and the need for visceral impact has been replaced by an enthusiasm for more cerebral engagement. 

I'm not saying I am right. I am  just saying that I think I am.

White Light From the Mouth of Infinity

Coming off the back of a pair of astounding albums (White Light and Love of Life), with Gira integrating the heavy ferocity of Swans' early albums and the psychedelic folk of The Burning World, Swans in the 1990s began to chase the shamanic ecstasy that has characteristic their recent come-back. Gira added a romantic lyricism to his previously sparse, brutal lyrics and replaced the slow, grinding slabs of sound which had defined albums like Cop with more complex composition, updating the psychedelic journeys of the late 1960s. 

Thanks to Gira's intense focus, however, Swans never disappeared into pointless jams: the UK tour saw the band find the common ground between harsh impact and melodramatic orchestration. A triple guitar assault was tempered by moments of fragile beauty and the ambiguity of the lyrics - love managing to come out as both saviour and killer, and spirituality a glittering trap and hope - was matched by galloping codas and disciplined improvisations.

The Future of Technology

Before the lap-top made it all too easy - meaning too few musicians bother their arses to test its potential - The Young Gods imagined a music reconstructed from the sounds of the past. Before they started singing in English, the Swiss band mined classical scores and metal riffs to impose the aesthetic of bricolage onto rock'n'roll. In the 1990s, when sampling was largely limited to hip hop or the occasional blatant quote, Frans Treichler melted two hundred years of music down into taut, aggressive rock: like Swans, the odd lyrical interlude only served to heighten the drama.