Swans (band)

Swans are majestic, beautiful-looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments. —Micheal Gira

Swans is an American experimental rock band founded in 1981 by Michael Gira. While initially an industrial/noise rock band the band has since explored numerous other genres such as post-rock, drone, and folk.

Lyrics

Filth

Be strong
Be hard
Resist temptation
Stick your hand in your eye
Close your fist
Resist
Walk on this line
Look straight ahead

• ”Stay Here”

Soundtracks for the Blind

Testing... one, two, three. Well... well fuck, haha. I mean, I just don't know what to say. I'm very glad to be here with you tonight. I'll be able to talk to you about some things... that I know a great deal about. Everyone knows that you are fucked up, and everyone knows that I am fucked up. But, does everyone know that you are more fucked up than me?

• ”I was a Prisoner in your Skull”

Can I steal your mind?
And can I crawl down inside?
And when I am your child
Can I feed in your eye?
And can I drink the air
Down in your cold black lung?
And can I breathe the sweet
Sick and lonesome blood?

• ”Hypogirl”

The Seer

I see it all

• ”The Seer”

Behind the veil of silver scars
There is a special inverted star
He's a greasy beast
Heaving in a field of sticky black mud
I'm down here naked
There's a hole in my chest
Both my arms are broken
Pointing east to west

Ahh, the mountains are crumbling
Ahh, the canyons are thundering
All the people are fucking
They're just a pile of writhing, selfish bliss
I know I'll never die
I scream up at the sky:
"You have arrived."

• ”The Seer Returns”

leaving meaning.

Floating, floating
I'm happy to be floating
I'm naked, I'm drifting
In black milk that I'm drinking
I'm licking, I'm sucking
White nipples, while sinking
Oh sweet light, oh mind krill
This throat jerks, this belly fills

• ”The Nub”

About

…even [Swans’] missteps offer substance greater than most bands could imagine. —Micheal Nelson

• Early Swans really is like little else on the planet before or since
  • Ned Raggett

• The Slave EP was a sound that I always wanted to hear, just the bleakest and blackest. The minimalist approach of the music, that was what really influenced me. It was non-genre-specific, with a total lack of baggage... purely abstract, surreal, and violent. It communicated to me in a very special way, and taught me that heavy metal could be stripped of everything and reduced to its most primal form. ... Swans ... paved the way for me.
  • Justin Broadrick, Godflesh frontman

• …a cacophonous rhythmic throb which drew on post-punk, industrial, doom metal, NYC avant minimalism and the blues; a sound which was matched by Gira's often nihilistic, anti-natalist and existential lyrical concerns ... delivered in a stentorian and messianic manner.
  • John Doran

• Going forward … things will be simpler and more intimate for Swans. When that time comes, I look forward to discovering a fresh path towards a new sonic terrain in which to dwell.
  • Micheal Gira

• It started in the sewer. Ugliness embodied. Noise like you’d never heard. The bellowing drawl of an unhinged slave driver, spitting abuse and mantras of degradation. "Nobody beats you like a cop, with his club." "Someone weaker than you should rape you." Lyrics sailed past pitch-black into some deeper, darker void of nastiness. The music was supposed to hurt. This was NYC in the early '80s. This was Swans.
• In its earliest incarnation, Swans set out to inflict itself upon the listener –- violation and domination set to post-punk sludge, meant to break you down, bend you over, and tear right through. Mastermind and sole constant Michael Gira drew on the writings of Jean Genet and the Marquis de Sade to sculpt his repetitious tirades, while an ever-shifting live band channeled the urban blight of no-wave and industrial into something much worse. The early records remain some of the most unapologetic, uncompromising sounds ever recorded.
• With the addition of Jarboe on vocals and keys –- she was the only other constant from '84-'97 –- structures began to shift, songs coalesced into singable, hummable things, and Swans burst outward in a cruel bloom of contradictory sounds. The first transitional records saw the original stew of post-punk and sludge retrofitted to stuttering industrial beats while softer, piano tracks started to appear. Before long, each passing record took on a new persona, and each shift saw the band's vision grow exponentially in texture and scope. Gira's obsessions -- power, religion, sex, death -- remained constant, but his impressionistic, shouted rants found new strength when he adopted a baritone croon and learned to tell stories, softening his attack to serve a higher calling.
• Swans' path was not without potholes: an infamous cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" jumps out as one of the worst things they ever did, and Gira has more or less disowned an entire chunk of his back catalog. But even the missteps offer substance greater than most bands could imagine.
  • Micheal Nelson

• The whole idea of being a noise band at this point is the most conformist, conservative, consumerist, brain-dead route you could take. I think it would be more adventurous to sing at a Holiday Inn.
  • Gira, quoted ibid.

• Closing track “Finally, Peace.” may end the album on a reflective high point, but by album’s end, I lay paralyzed, unable to decide if I desired a repeat or a reprieve. Unsettling as it may be, this conflict is a testament to Swans’ unparalleled ability to translate the absurd violence of the human condition into music that’s as intoxicating as it is intense.
  • Zoe Camp

• I wanted Swans to be 'heavier', though. I wanted the music to obliterate — why, I don’t remember! I think it just felt good.
  • Gira

• By 1986/7 Swans had run its course with the physical assault of sound that we had employed previously for the most part. I wanted to move on to other things and didn’t want to get stuck in some style, which in our case had the potential of becoming cartoonish if we’d continued in that direction. So, I pushed the music into unfamiliar territory.
  • Gira

• Swans are majestic, beautiful-looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.
  • Gira, quoted in Glide Magazine

• Granted, it’s not like Swans bludgeon you to death like it’s 1985 anymore, as the band’s sound has, of course, evolved significantly over the years to incorporate more dynamics, nuance, but perhaps most importantly: suspense. Case in point was their opening number, “The End of Forgetting,” which started out sounding like the aural equivalent of watching the sun rise from space, while steadily building in intensity/tempo before ultimately swelling into a massive, all-consuming crescendo that felt like you were being sucked into a pulsar by the end of it.
• Gira would often lose himself in the music, closing his eyes intently while performing, or flailing his arms wildly and dancing on stage with the fervor of a cult leader who had just drank some potent snake venom.
• But as unhinged as Gira may have seemed at times, such compulsions felt fully justified during performances of “The Merge,” for example. With the help of Dana Schechter, who added another wickedly groovy and powerful bass guitar to the mix, the band conjured up a truly intoxicating, almost tribal-flavored sonic swirl that had most of the crowd hypnotically nodding and grinding away to the relentlessly rhythm-heavy intensity of the music.
  • Zach Johnson, ibid.

External links

Official site