Duskrunner is the second full-length from San Francisco's Swanox. A follow up to the 2010 cassette release Dawnrunner, Duskrunner is a dreamy, chemically-aided drive through a neon-lit metropolis. It's incredibly clear from one listen of Duskrunner, Anthony has done his homework on the komische and the kraut - one can hear clear nods to the cosmic atmosphere of Florian Fricke and Popul Vuh, the drum machine and synth experimentation of Rudiger Lorenz, and the lysergic dream worlds of Tangerine Dream. That's not to say this a lazy ripoff album, however. This album uses those themes in a way that feels amazingly like a very specific time and place - San Francisco, now.
"Candle Station" and "No Locals" begin the hazy trip, with delayed 808s and guitars fusing with distant sounding vocals and analog synth buzz. "Bank of the Orient" and the title track continue the theme, with hints and pieces of melody sticking out enough to give Duskrunner a noticeable pop tinge. "The Whistler" is perhaps the climax of the record, a driving, motorik number that builds before ending as quickly as it began. If there was a soundtrack to what it feels like to be broke and sleepless in San Francisco - to walk aimlessly around streets that don't feel like home amid the chaos of a bustling yuppie playground, this is that soundtrack. Highly recommended.
NOW REISSUED ON VINYL!!!
While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years.
At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking.
Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointillist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely.
And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...
For all of the acclaim that we have given to Michael Gira's recent project Angels of Light, nothing that he has done of late has come close to the majesty, power, nihilism, and abjection of Children of God from his now defunct outfit Swans. Arguably, Children Of God is the best Swans record. Period. For a band that has so many great albums -- Filth and The Great Annihilator being just two -- this is saying something.
In many ways, Children Of God is a transitory album, marking the termination of the no wave marches that dominated the early recordings and announcing the centrality of Gira's songwriting prowess which continues on into the recent Angels of Light project. The miltant stomps, barked vocals, and expertly mangled buzzsaw guitars remain intact from those early recordings; but Gira and co. make those sounds even more ugly by juxtaposing them with the fragile beauty of a oboe solo, or a acoustic guitar introduction, or simply the majestic presence of Gira's now refined baritone. While fellow vocalist Jarboe had contributed to previous albums, the empathic dynamism of her voice really shines on Children of God, at times seductively cooing and at others emanating bloodcurdling screams. Lyrically, Children of God is a far more complex affair, extending the mythologies of power beyond grim tales of work as humiliation and all relationship roles cast to the extremities of either master or slave. Love enters the fray for Gira, or perhaps it is sexual dependence disguised as love? Or is it addiction disguised as religion? Gira, who once reveled in his position of terminal abjection, now damns himself to the ecstasies of the flesh and curses of his own megalomania.
World of Skin, found on disc two of this reissue, developed as the quiet alter-ego of Gira and Jarboe. While the later World of Skin albums were virtually identical in sound to the contemporary Swans body of work, the first World of Skin recordings (which at least on one occasion was condensed down simply to Skin) contrasted considerably to those of Swans at that time. The two World of Skin recordings on this disc are the two albums Blood, Women, Roses and Shame, Humility, Revenge. Drenched in nihilist atmospheres of infinite reverb, these songs are very spartan in their arrangements for acoustic guitar and majestic synthetic tones, spotlighting the bleak tales of the themes described in those titles above.
Both of these albums have been reissued before in various guises and have gone through prolonged periods of being out of print. Hopefully, Gira will keep both of these amazing albums in print from now on. They're so absolutely necessary, I might have to buy it again...
Throughout their tumultuous career marked by numerous extended tours across North America and Europe, Swans had always been a monstrously good live band. Often fueled by vodka and amphetamines, Swans' frontman Michael Gira never gave the impression that a Swans live show was a mere perfunctory gig in support of an album. His theatrical persona was to be massive cathartic experience, in which his expressions of abjection were to infect the rest of the audience through his commanding baritone bark and the musical hammer that made up the rest of Swans. In essence, to bear witness to Swans performing live was to have ones soul drained.
The inevitable translations from these performances onto the recorded media have always suffered from the obvious lack of Swans physical presence; but were more than adequate in providing documentation for how they sounded live. "Feels Good Now" was a semi-legitimate bootleg released back in 1987 of the Swans European tour. It had been 'authorized' by the band, but I'm pretty sure that it was just released anonymously by Gira. Nevertheless, this features a good chunk of the material from Swans' "Children Of God" album, which, if you're asking me, is easily Swans' best recording, filled with an oppressive atmosphere from militant rhythms, staccato guitar stabs, and call-and-response vocal incantations from Gira and Jarboe. While that album has gone in and out print a number of times (as I write this, it's out of print), "Feel Good Now" wouldn't be recommended as a substition for "Children Of God." But if you're already familiar with that album, this is an excellent addendum.
An aptly named album for a time and a place and a band. Swans' first full album came out in 1983 from the gritty underbelly of New York City, before Guiliani has kicked out all the freaks, criminals, and artists. The sound of Swans engorged the primal violence and psychological dread that had been first broadcast under the banner of No Wave a few years earlier. Led by the tyrannical Michael Gira, who probably only learned how to crack a smile some 15 years after the inception of Swans, barked and grunted lyrics which might be easier read as agitprop slogans, decrying the perceived imbalances of power through sex, money, depravity, and (later) religion. He controlled and commanded his band to perform pummeling excesses of rhythmic brutality with lurching basslines and atonal splashes of guitar shards forming the barest sense of what could pass for a melody. At the time of Filth, Gira had two thugs - Roli Mosimann and Jonathan Kane - behind drum kits, augmenting their panzer-korps marches with bloodyknuckled sheets of metal and pipe fights tossed into that engine at unpredictable moments and angles. For all of the furious muscularity and self-inflicted violence of Filth, Swans could color their claustrophobic slabs of sound with empathizing spells of existential misery. "Power For Power" is probably the best example of this, with guitarist Normal Westberg (the longest standing member of Swans aside from Gira) chopping the melody that could very be knocking on the door of The Stooges' raga-dirge "We Will Fall". It should also be noted that John Gossard swiped the title "Weakling" for his cult black metal band, and like Gira, used the term not to self-identify but as a damning epithet. The song itself is a depressive trudge of basslines alternating with dissonant guitars and shoved along by a strangely spry rhythm from one of the drummers, while Gira (taking on the role of the weakling) insists that all of the shit around him isn't real.
Filth still stands as one of the great achievements of an already highly acclaimed band. It's never been an easy listen, and never will be. Newly remastered and comes with a poster!
This double cd is a documentation of the very earliest abject thud-rock from the Swans. Along with the first full studio album, "Filth," this features a whole slew of early live material, with their bleak tape squeals accompanying their trademarked atavistic pummel. It should be noted that this is the third time "Filth" has been issued, and the second for "Body To Body," with 24 minutes of unreleased live material not found anywhere else.
The necessary vinyl reissue of the 1992 album Love Of Life! A propulsive, almost jubilant Swans is heard here, foreshadowing the Americana twang that Gira would later adopt in the Angels Of Light after Swans called it quits in the late '90s. Gira's great trick on this album is that he layers his shimmering, chiming guitars into slowly building walls of dissonant harmonics that rasp out of the acoustic instrumentation. It's a much more sophisticated dynamic than the emaciated bombast of such claustrophobic Swans recordings like Greed and Holy Money; and comparatively, it makes for a more subtle incarnation of Swans, even when Gira implores his multiple drummers to hammer away at their kits with militaristic flair and insistent rumbling.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
The second disc of the limited edition deluxe set is totally... fucking... awesome. This revisits Gira's capacity for relentlessly punishing dronerock, which had been clearly missing during his Angels Of Light period over the past decade. But this disc seamlessly emerges out of the slowburning crescendos from the aforementioned Soundtracks For The Blind and the amphetamine riddled noise mantra Number One Of Three that Gira produced as The Body Lovers. In many ways, this *could* be Number Two Of Three, as the Body Lovers project was supposed to be a trilogy of deconstructed Swans guitar swarm, chorales of car horns, and brute atonal fury. A single track spanning 46 minutes, Swans present a series of powerdrone movements with bass and rhythm guitar locked into militant marches that guide an scathing crosshatching of atonal guitars and electronics. The infernal nature of these sounds brings the scores of Hermann Nitsch's aktions to mind, and even some of Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies at their most punishing.
This double disc set is quite limited, we've sold a whole bunch already and are down to only about 10 copies, and then that'll be it (though the regular single disc version is in stock, and that one's on sale for the next 2 weeks). If you're ordering this deluxe one, and we run out, let us know if it's okay to send you the normal standard version...
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the musicians from those Swans gigs and sessions to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.
In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for obvious reasons), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold, as he was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity - in other words, the most brutalist period for the band. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to divebombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama, and power. Utterly brilliant.
And no, the vinyl sadly does not include the music from the extra disc found in the limited deluxe cd set.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Slow, militant explosions of huge percussive blasts, guitars, and bass rhythmically collide with the vocal bark of Michael Gira. An awesome document of the pure power of their live performances from 1986 that shows how far Gira has gone from this period ('Holy Money' / 'Greed') to the recent Angels of Light album. Finally out on CD.
Swans always wrote every song like it was going to be their last. Even so, the announcement that this was finally it, after some 15 years of honing word, gristle, rhythm and half-melody into some of the finest, most enduring, if (unsurprisingly) somewhat unfairly overlooked works in the whole rock cannon, comes as a shock.
That they decided to submit to cold economic reality and call it a day rather than face another soul-destroying struggle with media indifference and a diminishing fan base is sensible enough. But what is truly sad about the whole Swans saga coming to an end is the fact that the music they've been making these past years is every bit as powerful as the extraordinary, torturously slow, delayed-drop gallows rock with which they announced themselves at the start of the '80s.
These last Swansongs, spread over two cds (which, appropriately enough, last a lifetime) cap and conclude all the major Swans concerns. At the same time, the instrumental fragments and interludes that punctuate the fully developed pieces hint at all the Swansongs that now will never be, just as they provide tantalizing glimpses of the future directions that Swans motivating force Michael Gira, and longtime partner Jarboe, might take.
The musical scope of Soundtracks is as breathtaking as it is thematically devastating. Along with its immediate predecessor, Die T�r Ist Zu, it constitutes the cement that binds all their preceding music into a single, formidable body of work. The subject of this body of work is the human body itself, and the daily toll taken on both body and soul by pointless, spiritually unsatisfying work. The tape collage "How They Suffer" underlines the physical frailty that permeates the set. It features two tape extracts, one of Jarboe talking to her mother, who is facing the onset of old age; the other is Gira's father talking about the detached retina that has left him blind. The piece is as moving as it is characteristically bleak, in that it offers no solace other than the sense of calm acceptance in the two voices. This admission of more directly autobiographical material is rare for a group which always spoke in the first person to articulate universal, and universally ugly, truths. Perhaps the sense of mortality the piece invokes accelerated The Swans' decision to call it a day.
Where the younger, earlier Swans would subject the body to a vicious pummeling, simulating the cruelty of the exchange values that at base govern our lives, the latter day Swans will pile into a singular riff with the musical intention of providing a release. Monotonal guitar pieces like "The Sound" and "Helpless Child" combine the controlled frenzies of Glenn Branca's guitar orchestras with the emotional intensifications of Austrian blood-artist Herman Nitsch. Where before there seemed no end to The Swans' riffing, now the piling up of overtones finally bursts into the light that illuminates the earlier darkness. But the songs are scarcely less grim. "All Lined Up" is even more devastating in its updated version than it was in its original take on Gira's solo album Drainland. What was once a flesh parade is now a march of the dead�ghost shapes iridescent in the winter light and the narrative intoned in Gira's most weatherbeaten baritone. Time and again, Gira and Jarboe pick at the scabs of their past to see if they can still bleed. Empathy straddles the Greed/Holy Money and Children Of God eras with the narrator cursing a lapse into kindness as a betrayal of weakness, while the last song "The Final Sac", reprises the notion of love, divine or otherwise, as a form of dominance and submission.
Right up to their dying moments The Swans have stayed true to their witheringly bleak vision. It has absolutely no comparison in rock. Indeed, if Gira's obsessive way of putting a small, yet complete vocabulary through endless permutations of the same, seemingly self-loathing theme can be compared to anything it should be to the novels of the late, great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Meanwhile, another Austrian, the satirist Karl Kraus, summed up why he and their like keep gnawing at the same corpse: "Because," he said, "I persist in believing there's life in it yet."
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Scary stuff from the Swans' final tours.
While everyone here loves the Swans, we all have our favorite era. Pretty much all of us are WAY into the harsh, metal bashing pummel of the early years, on albums like Filth, Cop, Greed, but at the same time, we all also seem to love the group's later, more epic brooding folk flecked sound, one that hinted at Swans frontman Michael Gira's post Swans outfit Angels Of Light. That sound was first foreshadowed on the group's 1987 album Children Of God, which while still heavy and industrial, began to flirt with a much less harsh musical palette, one that was fully explored on the following year's The Burning World, their sixth album, and their only major label release, now finally reissued after many years.
At the time, the shift may have seemed more organic, but years later, it definitely like a crazy dramatic sonic shift, the band having shed pretty much all vestiges of their industrial past, and instead, embracing a dark swoonsome string laden psychedelic folk, the songs a mix of dark classic balladry, seventies UK acid folk, and low slung gothic gloom pop, a sound that fans of groups like King Dude, Hexvessel, Der Blutharsch, Cult Of Youth, Comus, Woven Hand and the like, will find surprisingly familiar, and we would imagine much to their liking.
Their continued post-industrial sonic trajectory definitely suited them, the abject metallic pummel and industrial crush of those early records replaced by a lush songsuite that seems to have more in common with Scott Walker, and Nick Cave, and other dark pop troubadours, the songs bleak and almost folky, often driven by an Eastern sounding percussion, giving some of the tracks an almost Muslimgauze vibe (due in no small part we'd imagine to input from producer Bill Laswell). Gira's croon ominous and dramatic, Jarboe's dreamy angelic background vocals the perfect foil, the backdrop a lush expanse of simple spare rhythms, lush, urgently strummed acoustic guitars, layered drones and lovingly layered soundscapes, fiddles and strings nestled alongside darkly pointilist pianos, the sound slipping from doomfolk creep to seasick waltz, to strange old time gypsy folk to strange almost angular pop, with some tracks that even bear hints of new wave, indie rock and post punk, but the band deftly weave these sounds into a haunting dark folk gem, that sounds as good now as it ever did.
And we had completely forgotten about Swans' version of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home", with Jarboe on lead vocals, the original transformed into a timeless darkfolk lament, that manages to sound harrowing and otherworldly, but hushed and dreamily lovely.
And of course there's the immediately recognizable Robert Mapplethorpe cover photo...
My co-worker Byram once asked the rhetorical question of Morton Feldman, "what self-respecting composer doesn't have their ouevre divided into three periods?" Maybe this is a reasonable question (albeit a bit silly), yet the same division of aesthetics ceratinly applies to Swans. Their first period centered around the butality of the "Cop" and "Filth" albums and had been described as "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography" with aggressively barked vocals from Michael Gira directing a muscular thud of clinically precise assaults, neither punk nor metal, but an abject creature of its own making. "Children of God" and the World of Skin side project marked the middle period with Swans, shedding some of their purposeful ugliness in favor of expansive dirges that matched a more complex mythological content, with a sublime and throroughly ashen beauty. "The Great Annihilator" from 1995 stands at the pinnacle of that final period for the Swans. The militant goose step rhythms remain as punishing as ever, but have been subjected to the all-encompassing swarm of buzz-saw guitar, bass, and keyboard drones. Yet amidst these dense orchestrations, the interlocking vocals of Gira (with his commanding baritone) and Jarboe (with her lilting theatricality) adeptly counter the jagged fury of the multiple guitar arsenals. A handful of bands from black metal circles (especially Katatonia and Beyond Dawn) have drawn heavily from this period of Swans, with considerable success; but the original is quite a masterful work. Finally reissued, with a bonus live cut.
Swans, Version 2.0 continues with The Seer, and how could it not be monstrous, epic, and utterly all-consuming? When Michael Gira reactivated the Swans several years ago, he did so with the intent of constantly touring the band, who furiously and methodically pounded through every set with Gira devilishly commanding to his band "More, you fuckers, MORE!!!" The songs which dominated the universally acclaimed 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky became grotesquely engorged during the live sets, with each track telescoping in length and straining with each note, each rhythmic smash made more intense than the previous one. The shows were exhausting from the perspective of the audience, and Gira's marathon-length sprint must have been hell on the band, but unlike previous incarnations of Swans, it was obvious that Michael Gira was full of joy in orchestrating all of this controlled havoc.
So, we come to The Seer - an album devised as a template malleable to the pressures of the Swans live performances. How these songs will sound at the end of the Swans 2012 tour, who the hell knows? Even outside the context of the forecasted mutation, The Seer is a beast of an album. The opening number "Lunacy" is a brightly charged march through dissonant guitar monochords and militaristic snares, before giving over to a wild-eyed chorale featuring the vocal talents of Mimi and Alan Sparhawk of Low. With Gira in charge, the emotional fragility that's emblematic of Low becomes lupine in its collective howl. "Mother Of The World" reprises the jackbooted rhythms found on the first Swans records, with a jagged guitar chord scraping bloodily against the unrelenting groove. The title track itself is a 32 minute piece that lesser bands would have used as an entire album with its massive crescendos of drone-rock pummel crashing down to a doomic plod and extended passages of slumped distortion, as something of a breather before ripping into another frenzy of gleeful obliteration.
Disc two opens with the much ballyhooed appearance of Karen O on the brief, lilting number "Song For A Warrior." It's more of an intermission for the band to shake out their arms and ears before Gira launches into another lengthy percussive workout, which is exactly what he does on "Avatar" - lockstep grooves for drums and bells rise up through a drone-rock ascent of guitars, bass, and vocals uttering languid melodies throughout before Gira commands the drummers into an furious crescendo of control, power, and noise. "A Piece Of The Sky" slowly unfurls through a shimmering drone density with plenty of Ligetti references but is probably also a thoughtful homage to Gira's amphetamine driven deconstruction on the brilliant Body Lovers cd from 1998, with a temperate Swans lurching forward into a near symphonic ballad. The finale "The Apostate" is a 24-minute vehicle for the screeching drones of lapsteel player Kristof Hahn, emitting divebombing raids across the throttled basslines, yelped vocals, and of course those interlocked rhythms.
We've got the limited 2cd combo which comes with a bonus dvd of live material from the last tour, during which Swans worked through variations of tracks that made their way on to this album, including "Avatar," "The Apostate", and "The Seer", with two gems from Children Of God and a few from My Father Will Guide Me...
And yeah, The Seer is just as good as everybody has been saying.
The latest masterpiece from these aQ-beloved musical misanthropes has moved well beyond the already boundary stretching sound of their previous album The Seer, and continues in a similar direction, shedding elements of song, and moving closer and closer to pure sound, with most of the tracks here unwinding like free form / free rock explorations, with only the barest hint of structure to keep them from drifting into utter shapelessness, but even then, whatever sonic constraints that are put in place, seem to be disregarded most of the time, the resulting records is hardly a rock record at all, but a gorgeous collection of brooding soundscapes, allowed to sprawl and ooze and drift and build, almost like an even more ephemeral / abstract Godspeed, and yet somehow, the tracks here are infused with an intensity, and sonic dread, that marks this as pure Swans.
That said, the opener "Screen Shot" might be the most curious of all the tracks here, as it's centered around a baseline, and drum part that are without a doubt, bordering on 'funky', so much so that before we even heard the record, people we posting online that the new Swans sounded like Primus. Which weirdly enough just made us want to hear it more. And when we finally did, well, we could definitely see that, but only Primus slowed down and stretched out and infused with a terrifying malevolence, and really, that funkiness become something else in a matter of minutes, some mutant strain of grim grooving bunkurfunk, that sounds more to us like Skull Defekts, and Michael Gira's vocals a dead ringer from the shamanistic conjuring of Defekts collaborator Daniel Higgs, but before you know it, the song blossoms into something even more tripped out and psychedelic, a swirling piano loop, jagged shards of guitar, eventually exploding into a wild cacophony that could go on forever, but instead burns bright and quickly fades out. An intense, invigorating start to what just might be the best of the modern Swans records.
There's not a track here that's less than 5 minutes, with the bulk closer to 15, and one clocking in at a stunning 34, and as mentioned above, they've done away with traditional compositional concerns, and have instead endeavored to craft their own modern minimalism, and it's truly stunning, from the slow core creep of "Just A Little Boy", that sounds a bit like the Necks via Woven Hand, but stretched out into one extended slow motion balladic dirge, laced with some truly terrifying vocals, to the atonal lope of "A Little God In My Hands", which sounds like multiple New Orleans jazz bands playing at once, before settling into a gorgeously creepy march, all glimmering electronics and swirling melodies, and some twisted call and response vocals.
Then there's the record's centerpiece, the 34+ minute "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L' Ouverture", which lurches right out of the gate as maybe the most rocking song here, a lumbering drum heavy riff, that instead of turning into a song, just locks into an endless hypno-rock cycle, that you never want to end, and for a while, it seems like it never will, before eventually setting into another apocalyptic swampy creep (and again reminding us of Woven Hand), before beginning and epic, majestic slow build, a vocal chorale draped atop a dark cacophonous roar, that gets almost metallic before dissipating into a free rock sprawl, all long tones, and drones, moaned vocals, and warm electric piano shimmer, as well as some FX heavy percussion, and finally a wild freaked out psychedelic squall. Disc one ends with a hushed horror ballad, all moaning distant horns, and sinister vox, and atonal melodies swirling throughout. And most bands would hang it up there, but this is the Swans after all, so we're only halfway there.
The second disc begins with a twisted bit of malformed Tom Waitsian weirdness, all groovy percussion, swirling junkyard ambience, and some strange vocals refrains, before erupting into some swampy garage rock swagger, slithery and sinister, distorted and psychedelic, the sound layered and dense and seriously fierce. From there on out, To Be Kind seems to open up into some sort of alternate universe rock opera, brooding ballad gives way to horn flecked death march dirge, wild kraut-funk groovery grows more and more atonal, pocked with elephant bleat blasts, and feral vocal bellows, long stretches of kosmische drift, and jazzy piano shimmer slowly evolve into another bout of swampy swagger, "Nathalie Neal", a piece that's drum driven and intense (and named for an aQ pal!), before finally finishing off with the title track, a haunting, subdued finale, all dramatic croons and whispery chordal drift, that bursts into a full on freakout, blistering arcs of distorted guitars wreathed around pounding drum damage, and billowing swirls of psychedelic noise, the rare piece of music that is as exhausting and exhilarating to hear, as it presumably is to play.
Totally transcendent, dizzyingly ambitious, stunningly executed, and thus utterly and totally recommended. Creepy baby face cover art too! And, while they last, we've got the Deluxe Edition, which comes with a live dvd, featuring performances of several songs from this album along with renditions of "Coward" and "The Seer". That's if you get the double cd, your other option is the swank triple vinyl, but no dvd with that, but it does have a download.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
With an overzealous major label deal, the collapse of Rough Trade (who just signed the Swans after that deal with MCA), and the subsequent signing to the doomed-from-the-start Sky records, 1988 - 1992 was a tumultuous era for the Swans which saw their primal fury distilled into bleak acoustic-based dirges. "Various Failures" collects the best work from "The Burning World" (the MCA album), "Love Will Tear Us Apart" EP, "10 Songs For Another World" (the 2nd World of Skin album), "White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity", and "Love of Life"... all of which are currently out of print.
Swans are one of the few bands whose live recordings should be paid attention to; and in their lengthy career, a smattering of semi-authorized bootlegs and Gira-sanctioned live recordings trickled in and out of print, including the epic Feel Good Now 2lp documenting their Eastern European tour for Children Of God, the Swans Are Dead recordings from the final tour with Jarboe on board, and the charmingly titled album Public Castration Is A Good Idea. After the Swans Are Dead album was released, Michael Gira called it quits for a while; but his thirst for heavy pummelling percussion and discordant slabs of guitar noise proved greater than his desire to write beautifully plaintive country numbers. Swans reformed in 2011 with a magnificent fury evidenced on the album My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky; and Gira issued the marching orders shortly thereafter for Swans to head out on the road, a crew that included his original guitarist Normal Westberg. The tour was as relentless as Swans' music, with Gira and company crossing the globe in support of the album.
To support the record to follow My Father Will Guide Me, Gira issued a limited edition set of live recordings from that tour exclusively through the Young God Records website. That edition sold out so quickly that he issued a second pressing in a handsome double digipack with a much greater distribution. While the recording quality is exceptional, what's truly impressive is the brutal precision that Gira directs his band to pursue through the entire Swans catalogue. On this recording, there's also a great distribution of older material alongside most all of the cuts from My Father Will Guide Me. The highlights include the surging drone-rock groove of "Apostate" with Gira barking above his natural baritone and the Nietzchean commands that Gira bellows during the doom-thud of "Sex God Sex." The prettiest and most restrained number is "Your Property" originally written back in 1984 for the seminal album Cop, which would never be mistaken for being pretty or restrained. The difference in listening to Gira now as opposed to Gira some 15 years ago is that he had a huge chip on his shoulder needing to prove to the world that he was worth something. Now, he's fully confident in his abilities and in the choices he's made for his artistic career. He knows that Swans are awe-inspiring and terrifyingly great. So should you.
The necessary vinyl reissue of the 1991 album White Light From the Mouth Of Infinity! Swans were in a time of transition, after what M. Gira considered an epic failure in their one and only major label release, The Burning World (1989), and it is also worth noting that founding member / guitarist Norman Westberg had parted ways with Swans at this juncture. The tempered acoustic strum that Gira first mapped out on Burning World carries over as the much more aggressive underpinning of the crashing hypno-drone-rock of much of White Light, most dramatically cast in the downer blues ballad "Failure" and the J.G. Thirwell coproduced drum-corps march of "Power & Sacrifice". The lilting jangle of the guitars and the brightly rendered drones that hang throughout both that album and Love Of Life counterpoints Gira's booming vocals, all of which helps to conjure a very triumphant Swans sound, effectively surging with huge crescendos of texture and density out of monolithic chords, riffs, and rhythms.
A three cd compendium of work tracking two very prolific years for Swans, including the 1991 album White Light From the Mouth Of Infinity, the 1992 album Love Of Life, and full disc of bonus material! Swans were in a time of transition, after what M. Gira considered an epic failure in their one and only major label release, The Burning World (1989), and it is also worth noting that founding member / guitarist Norman Westberg had parted ways with Swans at this juncture. The tempered acoustic strum that Gira first mapped out on Burning World carries over as the much more aggressive underpinning of the crashing hypno-drone-rock of much of White Light, most dramatically cast in the downer blues ballad "Failure" and the J.G. Thirwell coproduced drum-corps march of "Power & Sacrifice". The lilting jangle of the guitars and the brightly rendered drones that hang throughout both that album and Love Of Life counterpoints Gira's booming vocals, all of which helps to conjure a very triumphant Swans sound, effectively surging with huge crescendos of texture and density out of monolithic chords, riffs, and rhythms. Further, Love Of Life foreshadows the Americana twang that Gira would later adopt in the Angels Of Light after Swans called it quits in the late '90s.
Bonus material spans a bunch of various sources - the Love Of Life EP, the Omniscience odds & ends collection, the 'official bootleg' Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room, the World Of Skin album 10 Songs For Another World, and three unreleased / live / demo tracks!r
You've heard this, right? No? Well now that you can get a copy for under $100, now's a good a time as any to start at the beginning of the Swans discography. Repressed on its own for the first time since 1990, these four tracks don't quite pack the same violent punch of the misanthropic masterpiece Filth that would come out a year later, but what does? In a way, these tracks more closely resemble the modern re-tooled Swans then the hateful pounding of Filth/Greed/Holy Money Swans. Post-punk basslines and repetitive rhythms that for any other band would probably be their most primal and violent record, but this is Swans we're talking about here. Michael Gira is more political dissident then tyrannical strongman on here, with vocals managing whole sentences rather than barked orders. A must-listen for any Swans fan, and perhaps your only chance of owning these tracks on vinyl short of ponying up for an original!
When Man With Potential, the latest solo record from Pete Swanson, one half of late great floorcore noise outfit Yellow Swans, first came out late last year, it sold out so fast, we never got a chance to list it, in fact we got so few copies we sold out before most of US even got to hear it, so we weren't really sure what the hubbub was all about, other than it involved 'beats'. Thankfully, it's been repressed. And thankfully, Man With Potential is nothing nearly as simple as a noise record with beats, although it is quite noisy, and is definitely the most rhythmic thing we've heard from Swanson. Opener Misery Beat unfurls a dizzying swirl of creaks and squeaks, bloops and bleeps, into a dizzying churn, the beat hear more implied, a pulsing chunk of crumbling low end dragged along in the loop, but then about three minutes in, the proper beat does in fact drop, a pounding four on the floor house music thud, pulsating beneath the glimmering field of high end skitter and dubbed out bleepage. But let's not forget that Swanson was born of the noise scene, so the track gradually builds momentum, picking up all manner of sonic detritus on the way, heaving swells of super distorted chordal crunch, keening shards of blunted noise, that chittering high end also getting louder and more distorted, until finally, the track sounds like some crazed hybrid of an electronically simulated runaway train, and the noisiest rave ever. It's pretty fantastic stuff, managing to be hypnotic and repetitive, but staying totally engaging and mesmerizing throughout. Follow up "Remote View" follows a similar pattern, this one a bit more dubbed out and woozy, the melodies more stately and melancholic, still wreathed in the same crunch and keen, the sound gristly and corrosive, but weirdly dreamy and drifty as well, sounding almost like a slightly house-ier Portishead by way of Merzbow. Elsewhere, the beat is sometimes sublimated, relegated to a heartbeat like pulse beneath thick sheets of blown out, in-the-red melodic buzz, and carefully sculpted prismatic noise, and still elsewhere, Swanson channels old school gabber through a thick haze of Our Love Will Destroy The World like soft cacophony, and still elsewhere crafts some straight up electro-pop club music, but buries it beneath an avalanche of glorious noise, strangely melodic and lush, almost shoegazey, but an awesome sort of buzz drenched blissiness. And then there's the title track, which might be the noisiest of the bunch, and sounds a bit like several record playing at once, a head spinning collision of Astral Social Club at their beat heaviest, and Our Love Will Destroy The World (again) at his loopiest, but together, it's a wild chunk of swirling psychedelic noisiness that is again surprisingly listenable, eventually blossoming into a wash of blissed out noise drenched dreaminess.
This lp comes with a bonus cd, which is NOT a digital version of Man With Potential, but is instead a whole 'nother record called Man With Garbage, which seem to be culled from the same sessions, as they display a similarly noisy beatiness, although it definitely leans more toward the noise side of the equation, the sound a bit more lo-fi and raw, but even at its noisiest, strap on the headphones and dunk your head in that roiling torrent of sound, and you'll discover all manner of muted melody fractured poppiness and swirling dreamy hooks. "Returns" is a heaving big beat almost Nadja-worthy doomic churn, while the two part, 25 minute "Challenger" is less about beats, and more about texture and timbre, flitting from full on face melting white noise, to stuttering staticky melody flecked crunch and crumble, to blurred blown out psych-noise dreaminess.
We imagine this pressing is probably limited too, so grab one before they're gone. Again!
We'd been hearing a lot about this band, lots of folks calling them the 'next big thing' which tend to make us pretty skeptical. But the descriptions made us think we'd actually probably dig it, and we do. Like a lot of recent faves, Swearin' channel that while nineties indie/college rock sound (Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., the Pixies, Pavement, etc.), and sound like they would have been our favorite band back in the day, and since it seems folks our age, never really got over THAT sound, they definitely have potential to be a new favorite. The sound is definitely derivative, but that's the point right? To these ears, sometimes Swearin' sound like a super charged Blake Babies, with Dinosaur Jr. guitars, and at others, like Pavement crossed with Sebadoh, and really, we'd be hard pressed to think of better band math than that. And although aping a sound is pretty easy, with the right gear, and the right recording, it's not nearly as easy to come up with the sort of SONGS to go with the sound. But Swearin' have it dialed in. With multiple vocalists, boy AND girl, they kick out the nineties indie rock jams, like, well, like it was still the nineties, swaggery and slackery, noisy and a little bit shoegazey, fuzzy and distorted, loose and ramshackle, jangly and hooky as hell, it's hard not to love, and really why try not to. A BIG TIME new favorite around here for sure. For fans of the Pixies, the Swirlies, Pavement, Dinosaur, Liz Phair, Superchunk, Sebadoh, Built To Spill, the Breeders, the Silver Jews and all the rest...
They don't make music like this any more. At least not much. But it seems that in some little corner of Virginia (let's call it Richmond), there's a healthy scene of emo/screamo/punk rock/post punk whatever the fuck you want to call it happening, and all we know is it's noisy and heavy and chaotic and angular and mathy and we love it. There are probably tons of little scenes like this all over, and if you're in one, then by all means send us some music. But for now we'll keep digging deeper into this particular scene. We listed the debut cd from Richmond's The Catalyst recently, and holy shit did that record kick our asses, and now we have Sweat Lodge, who take a lot of the same influences, old Amrep, Drive Like Jehu, San Diego Gravity style screamo, all sorts of post punk, and pack it into 6 songs in ten minutes, angular, frenzied, frenetic, heavy, lots of parts, throat shredding vocals, freaked out drumming, guitars that chug and crunch and squeal, and even some actual hooks snuck in there.
By now you know if this is your cup of tea or not, it's most definitely ours.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!! The packaging is super complex, intricate line drawings, water colored, printed on beige cardstock and hand cut into an elaborate fold out sleeve, really really cool!
FINALLY HERE ON VINYL AND BACK IN STOCK ON CD TOO!! This Record Of The Week (and Allan's #1 of the year), went completely AWOL from distribution shortly after we first listed it last summer, d'oh. Now at last the label sorted out a new distro, and so we have the cd back from limbo, and also the vinyl version now available too for the first time!!! Here's our original review...
Not to be confused with a few other Sweat Lodges out there (we reviewed a tape by a screamo punk band called Sweat Lodge a few years back), this Sweat Lodge is a heavy psych stoner rock band outta Austin, Texas, and they are AWESOME. Seriously, all the stoner rock digging peeps here at AQ immediately fell in love at first listen, they're that good. Actually we meant to list it a few weeks ago, but our supplier was out of stock - but now we've 'em are not only listing it, but making it Record Of The Week, just 'cause everybody here (not just the stoner rock digging peeps) has been digging it so much and we're still spinning it a LOT.
There's a big Black Sabbath influence evident here, you know, jamming grooves, powerful riffage, and Ozzy-ish (but not too Ozzy-ish) vocals... Sure, lots of bands play that game these days, but these guys are winners. Just super solid, with catchy songs, a dark and trippy vibe, and maybe most crucially, those vocals - the guy is good! Also the sound and mix is just right, clean but not too polished or produced, just a very satisfying, listenable sound, heavy but accessible and melodic. Along with the Sabbath, what we're hearing reminds us of the likes of Uncle Acid, Freedom Hawk, (fellow Austinites) Fogg, maybe even some Golden Void, and other heavy, rockin' faves so if you're into stuff like that, do yourself a favor and check out Sweat Lodge!!!
Weirdly, this band started out as a three piece, of just bass, drums, and vocals - no guitar! They performed and even put out a 7" and demo tape with that lineup, and that stuff WAS cool (lotsa heavy fuzz bass and those killer vocals, yeah why not?) but really they made the right decision recently to expand the band to its current five-piece format, as documented on this debut full-length, bringing in not just one but two guitarists for not just a fuller, even heavier sound but a lot more interesting psychedelic interplay and texture. Sabbath with twin guitars, nice idea. Just listen. Everybody we've played it for so far has gotten hooked!
This cdep is credited to Bonny/Sweeney, but we did our sleuthing and figured out the not-so-hard-to-figure-out fact that it's noneother than Bonnie... ahem, Bonny "Prince" Billy and Matt Sweeney. Seems Will Oldham (aka Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace... etc) has roped Mr. Sweeney into his moniker hijinks. He keeps on rearranging and respelling his many names. Geeez, it'll drive ya to distraction! Anyways, this is four more barebones songs from those two fellows, plus the cd is 'enhanced' to include what the traycard describes as "Mike Piscitelli's visualization" of their song "I Gave You". If you dug their Superwolf full length, this will surely please your ears (and eyes) too.
After just reviewing one of our old favorite records, Chavez's Gone Glimmering, we were pretty darned excited to discover that the new Bonny Prince Billy record was actually a collaboration between Will Oldham (aka BPP) and Matt Sweeney from Chavez! Sweeney also just happened to front one of our favorite eighties/nineties college rock outfits Skunk (someone should definitely resissue the first Skunk lp on cd!!) as well as playing guitar in the post Smashing pumpkins supergroup Zwan. This collaboration was born of a challenge, Oldham had Sweeney write music, and Oldham would then write the lyrics and they would record the record together. The overall result is not immediately all that different than a Palace or Bonny Prince Billy record. The vocals are still sweet and warbly, the music is still twangy and mournful. But Sweeney has definitely come up with some beautiful tunes, well written but also nicely arranged, often augmented by big drums and rich keyboards, much less spartan than a lot of Oldham's past recordings. And a bit more rocking, with hints of the Allman Brothers, seventies rock, fuzzy psychedelia, and once or twice some big crashing chords and wailing leads that are straight out of the Skunk / Chavez songbook. Sweeney's vocals sound perfect with Oldham's, the two weaving and harmonizing beautifully. And of course Oldham's lyrics are as wry and cryptically sweet as ever. This definitely ranks up there with Ease On Down The Road and Master And Everyone as one of Oldham's finer moments.
Imagine your favorite emo math rock band with the addition of a skronking free jazz style sax player. A little June of 44, a little Slint, a little Charles Gayle. Awesome.
Talk about some fine cover art!! A watercolor silhouette of a warrior, carrying a bloody scythe and a shield on horseback. Nice. Chicago's finest post rock warriors return with another blast of complex, stop/start, loud/soft saxophone studded RAWK. Long songs. Complicated but melodic enough to be memorable and rocking enough to kick ass! Super tight and super fierce, after an almost break up, and some line-up changes a few years back, this band just keeps getting better and better. Fans of Hella, Don Caballero, A Minor Forest, Dianogah, Rumah Sakit and all that sort of stuff will very likely have a new favorite record!
Newest release from Chicago's kings of math rock. STLJ add saxophone to the mix turning what could be just another math rock band into a swirling whirling melange of Shellac, Slint and Albert Ayler. This is easily their best record so far. Tight and heavy and relentless, but somehow catchy and melodic at the same time. The cover is a parody of a Hall and Oates album but somehow ends up looking exactly like the recent posthumous A Minor Forest collection (a band they have quite a bit in common with). Recommended.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Psychedelic pre-Ghost Japanese trio with Masaki Batoh.
From the same folks who brought us the Carlton Melton "Handling Snakes" single, here's a 7" by the band Sweet Apple, featuring several members of doom rockers Witch (namely drummer J. Mascis, better known for his gig as guitarist in a band called Dinosaur Jr., and namesake bassist Dave Sweetapple, who insists that the rest of the band thought it would be funny to call themselves Sweet Apple). The other two guys in Sweet Apple are also from Cobra Verde. So its a semi-super group we guess.
We missed reviewing their full-length on Tee Pee, which apparently features both of the tracks found here, and to be honest this isn't entirely convincing us to go back and give it another listen, though maybe we should. At least check this out if you're interested in some authentic, anthemic, kick ass, good ol' fashioned rock n' roll. Definitely a bit "bar band" sounding, so grab a beer, and go with it
Limited to 500 copies, with a nice cover by poster artist Alan Forbes!
During the years 1990 through 1993 there was a burst of absolutely incredible pop music. A few in particular come to mind: The Posies' Frosting On The Beater, Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque, Velvet Crush's In The Presence Of Greatness, Redd Kross' Third Eye and this one by Matthew Sweet. Oh yes, our love for these albums is like an everlasting gobstopper.
The seeming direct descendent of Big Star, The Raspberries and America, Mr. Sweet's Girlfriend is filled with ache in your heart, heart on your sleeve, lump in your throat pop at its best. Power pop that is. Big guitars, huge choruses, amazing harmonies, and hooks galore. There is probably not a person alive who doesn't immediately recognize the intro to "I've Been Waiting" or the chorus to "Girlfriend". This was the sort of pop music that oozed emo before emo was cool! The other interesting thing about Sweet's Girlfriend was the backing band, featuring two very un-pop players, Robert Quine (Richard Hell & The Voidoids) and Richard Lloyd (Television) who gave the record some punky punch and added all sorts of unlikely guitar parts, which helped make Girlfriend so much more than just another commercial pop record. The band also featured some other equally unlikely contributions from folks who played with K.D. Lang, Velvet Crush, Scritti Politti, and Material as well as Mr. Lloyd Cole himself.
This swank reissue comes packaged in a deluxe double digipak with a slipcover and tons of photos and liner notes as well as a whole extra disc, featuring the companion to Girlfriend, Goodfriend, a disc of home demos, alternate versions, as well as killer covers of Neil Young's "Cortez The Killer" and John Lennon's "Isolation". Awesome!
Not long ago we highlighted a cool compilation on the Psychic Circle label devoted to '70s British glam rock, entitled "Blitzing The Ballroom" - an obvious reference to a song and band that didn't actually appear on the comp, The Sweet and their biggest hit, "Ballroom Blitz"! That song is an immortal glam anthem, up there with anything by Slade, T-Rex or Gary Glitter... and definitely provided some inspiration to the far more obscure acts who populated that collection, Sweet being a band who began as bubblegum lightweights but soon became glam champs with hard rock guitar chops.
So, if you're one of the folks who picked up that comp, and loved the catchy, campy, kick assery found on it, and DON'T have anything by The Sweet, well this new double disc anthology is just the thing for ya. Particularly since Sweet's albums, with the exception of Desolation Boulevard, are still sorta hard to come by in the States (and on top of that, their discography is a confusion of UK- and US- only releases, including separate versions of the same albums with wildly different tracklistings). It's probably easiest to go with a comprehensive 'best of' like this one, which brings together tracks taken from various of their albums '73-'80, plus the b-side of the "Love Is Like Oxygen" single, a boogie number called "Cover Girl".
There's 16 songs on each of the 2 discs, ranging from the band's earliest pre-fab pop incarnation circa 1973 to the quasi-metallic, semi-symphonic genius stuff they came up with once they came into their own in the mid '70s... all the way to their declining years as the '80s were about to dawn, the glories of glam far behind them, the new wave getting a try out. All of Sweet's styles are represented here, starting off with the bubblegum pop likes of "Funny Funny" and "Alexander Graham Bell"... soon The Sweet start revving it up, though, with tracks like "Little Willy" and "Wig-Wam Bam" being just as sugary as their earlier stuff but with extra rock n' roll oomph. Then track ten, disc one rolls around, with THAT drum intro, and it's time for a good ol' "Ballroom Blitz", that the band has been building up to! And that's more or less when the action really starts, the rest of disc one filled with equally worthy hits like "The Six Teens", "A.C.D.C.", and "Fox On The Run". Total teenage kicks, delivered with panache (and vocal harmonies) that we imagine would surprise and thrill quite a few Queen fans.
The Queen comparison continues on disc two, which also provides some real evidence for considering Sweet something of a METAL band, ripping it up with a pop/prog twist. Definitely the likes of "Action", "Sweet F.A." and "4th Of July" (which reminds us of a jazzy Uriah Heep) display their share of heaviness! There's a reason why the Scorpions covered Sweet songs (they did - we've heard a bootleg!). The Sweet were pushing into Queen -and- Led Zeppelin territory for sure (they parallel some non-metallic Zep moves here too, like their funk side, a bit). Eventually, as the disc progresses, they tend to retreat from the rock, the kitschy synths taking over from the guitars, as the band tries again for pop hitmaking success, leaving you to wonder what would have been had they simply 'gone metal' instead... ah well, 'twas good while it lasted.
As with any anthology, one can quibble with the selections, we'd have included more tracks from 1976's Give Us A Wink! (like the stomping, almost Sabbathy "Cockroach") but, all in all, the compilers of this set did pick the best Sweet stuff for the most part, without over-representing any one facet of their career (which we might have done, if we'd be asked to make our own, single disc collection, concentrating on the more metal side of Sweet, the stuff that sounds like it would fit comfortably on Queen's Sheer Heart Attack...).
Fun stuff from an often underrated yet talented band whose commercial success came at the expense of classic rock cred, though if you give this a spin you'll realize they were indeed badass rockers, when they wanted (or were allowed) to be... again, if you're partial to any '70s glam jams, you've gotta get into The Sweet! And if you thought this band was all just "Ballroom Blitz" and nothing else, you've got another think coming, especially when you hear the song "Action".
Ace Of Spades is a cd-r series of live recordings showcasing the intimate acoustic music of a variety of local indie artists. The series so far boasts consistently strong performances from all participants (well played and well recorded at Mama Buzz Cafe in Oakland).
Volume 4 is from the December 12th 2004 show starring Dave Gleason's Wasted Days and Sweetbriar. You get nine songs from the former (including a great version of Gram Parsons' "A Song For You") and seven from the latter (ending with a fine medley of "The Wild Side Of Life" and "Honky Tonk Angels" originally by Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells respectively).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Maintaining the loyalty to twisted Beefheartian overtones with Birthday Party dementia, this album is less of all out noise attack (as previous Sweetheart albums have been) and more of the trash blues that Pussy Galore wallowed in so well.
An excellent retrospective compiling ten long out-of-print singles and eps from this beloved SF veteran band. Bastards & Rarities resonates warmly with their distinct gritty and slightly trippy down-to-earthness. Early '90s college indie rock heaven: raw fuzzy guitars, steady shuffling drumming and drowsy boyish vocals. You can certainly hear connections between these songs and those of Swell's Bay Area contemporaries such as American Music Club or Pavement as well as their younger brethren like Grandaddy. Pretty darn great!
Swell co-founder David Freel stands alone at the helm a decade after they hit the indie-rock air waves. The latest effort maintains the integrity of David's heart-felt, shiny-sad lyrics and the swell's distinctively angular riffs that culminate in catchy pop choruses. Recommended.
Following up their fine retrospective Bastards & Rarities from a few months ago, please welcome Swell's brand new full length! This time around, mainman David Freel, the recently rejoined drummer/co-founder Sean Kirkpatrick and company seem to have shifted their rock stylings (usually quite akin to their indie rock brethren Pavement and Grandaddy) ever so slightly into an even more shuffling, expansive sound, not unlike Badly Drawn Boy. Mildly mopey, weathered vocals weave through the often soaring, catchy compositions that feature some of their most fully fleshed out instrumentations. Hard crunching electric guitars punctuate the proceedings while the vigorously strummed acoustic guitars drive the songs and add an overall breezy warmth. The sound of the guitar pick on the strings adds a nice percussive counter element to the drums. The album is laced with plenty of subtle textural details such as this - the sound of a train rushing by, glimpses of dialogue, puffs of static hiss. A complex and richly hued yet still very earthy album. As always, very recommended.
Newly Reissued on Vinyl!
The Swell Maps were a brief late seventies / early eighties solar flare of totally brilliant, clattery, jangly, ramshackle experimental art pop like no one had ever heard. And without the Maps we definitely would not have had Sonic Youth or Pavement or about a million other bands. Fronted by brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, Swell Maps were a bouncy Britpunk kick in the chin, mixed with druggy clumsy psych rock explorations, speaker bashing freakouts, hypnotic droney dirges, whiny snotty British vocals, brittle guitars, splattery drumming and and downright free-noise.
A Trip To Marineville was their debut record from 1979. Reissue comes with a download card plus bonus 7" that accompanied the original release!
Awesome collection of hits and non-hits from this seminal post-punk rock band, featuring both Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks.
Newly Reissued on vinyl!
The Swell Maps were a brief late seventies / early eighties solar flare of totally brilliant, clattery, jangly, ramshackle experimental art pop like no one had ever heard. And without the Maps we definitely would not have had Sonic Youth or Pavement or about a million other bands. Fronted by brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, Swell Maps were a bouncy Britpunk kick in the chin, mixed with druggy clumsy psych rock explorations, speaker bashing freakouts, hypnotic droney dirges, whiny snotty British vocals, brittle guitars, splattery drumming and and downright free-noise.
Jane From Occupied Europe was their second and final record from 1980. The band split soon after with Sudden forming the Jacobites and Soundtracks going on to join Crime And The City Solution. Download card included!
"While 1999's 'International Rescue' compilation focused on rare and unreleased material, 'Sweep the Desert' focuses on the more experimental side of the Maps" according to the press release, and it is compiled by the three living members Nikki Sudden, Richard Earl and Jowe Head. While "Sweep the Desert" has classics such as "Midget Submarines" and "Then Poland", this compilation is less essential for longtime fans as it contains only previously released material. However, it may be of interest to those having a hard time tracking down the Maps' out-of-print back catalogue. Speaking of back catalogues, why can't somebody just reissue theirs and eliminate this continuation of compilation bullshit?
