Swans

$16 advance / $20 day-of-show


with MICHAEL TAMBURO

The Seer took 30 years to make. It’s the culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I’ve ever made, been involved in or imagined...The songs began on an acoustic guitar, then were fleshed out with invaluable help from my friends, then were further tortured and seduced in the studio, and now they await further cannibalism and forcefeeding as we prepare to perform some of them live...Despite what you might have heard or presumed, my goal is to spread light and joy through the world. My friends in Swans are all stellar men. Without them I’m a fluffy kitten, an infant. Our goal is the same: ecstasy!" - Michael Gira

The voice of Swans frontman and founder Michael Gira is one of stentorian command. Even during the lightest moments of his three-decade career, Gira's bellow has been deep, dark, and direct, both an apt vehicle for his raw lines about spiritual tumult and human filth and a compelling accompaniment to the band's stylized roil... Loud, mean, and complicated, this six-piece is an articulate goliath, capable of drowning waves of sound before disappearing into pools of silence without warning. Each piece deserves mention: The finesse of longtime member Norman Westberg's guitar playing offers the perfect foil for Gira's general force. Christopher Pravdica's bass snaps as much as throbs, while Christoph Hahn uses his double-lap steel guitar not as a country-music accent mark but as an origin of general abrasion. Drummer Phil Puleo (of Cop Shoot Cop) and multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris often double the rhythm, giving that old Swans stomp bigger feet. This band is at once visceral and subtle, reverent with the source but relentless with the sound. During "Sex, God, Sex", Swans suggest the sound of a thousand whips lashing at once; during "The Seer", they shape feedback into geometric patterns that Sonic Youth and Sunn O))) alike might admire…

In January of 2010, when Gira announced that he was reforming Swans, he wrote a predictably didactic open letter that made his purpose with the band clear: "After five Angels of Light albums, I needed a way to move forward, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that... It's not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past." For the last two years, one of the world's most bellicose bands has paid respect to its legacy largely by leaving it alone and tried to expand it by testing its old limits. Here, they do just that, beating past successes with the purpose of the present and showing that-- reunion or no, 58-year-old frontman or no-- this is exactly the kind of forward-pointing roadmark Swans deserve.