I might be one of the people that guest hates, because I only jumped onto Swans bandwagon a year after The Seer was released. Then I indulged in My Father..., and now I am engrossed in TBK. I know NOTHING of pre2010 Swans (although I will get Soundtracks one day I'm sure.) But none of this changes the fact that TBK and Seer are monumental achievements, even if they are very different from those early records.

guest, you're making it more than it is. (a) Swans is not a cult, its a band, they release records, they hope people will listen and/or buy them; (b) just because people "bandwagon" onto a band doesn't make them fake, or make their opinions less valid, after all, attracting new listeners and a new audience is kind of why bands put out records in the first place, after all, how did you discover them exactly? Some kind of metaphysical revelation from above? Did Gira personally send you a private copy and explicitly ask you not to share his band with anyone else? In other words, chill out!

guest will really hate me when I say I LOVED reading that review about a week ago. I think it is the best written review on TBK I've seen.

I came to Sonic Youth in 1988. Just want to throw that out there. :eek:

Suchfriends, you're speaking much sense. Some people jus need to chill out, listen to the album and (most importantly) make their own opinions.

i can see where guest is coming from, he's an old fan who doesn't like how Swans are suddenly getting popular among the tumblr generation.

i'm with you though, i wouldn't recommend anyone to be so concerned about what other people listen to and their motives.

apologies for all this, was drunk when I wrote the first one and monumentally hung over for the second so both the logic and the fundamental point itself are pretty fucking absurd.

as for the stereogum article, it wasn't the review itself but rather the comments section. they're symptomatic of what the problem is, not you skuj. you've obviously expressed a willingness to explore beyond their recent output. I'll give you an example: I had a bunch of friends who "loved" the new swans stuff because it was I shit you not "dark" and "rad" because of said darkness, so I put on some fushitsusha and they all fucking recoiled. I understand that the latter are more abrasive than swans, and not so much cartoonishly dark (as swans are) as they are molasses black to the core, but on a basic level they are both hellish noise rock, that's it. and yet these people for some reason totally unknown to me can't resonate with this music on any level whatsoever, as a result of which I am totally bemused.

it's not that they have a widening fanbase which is of concern to me, hell I wasn't even born when swans were in their original run so who the fuck am I to comment? instead what I'm saying is this newfound group appreciate the music on an incredibly superficial level, and I guess it's the age-old feud between 'music fan' and 'music lover', given that this is an art form which I for better or worse take deadly seriously. popularity is never, EVER an issue, but to have people latching on (perhaps merely momentarily) who are only fleetingly interested in the group irrevocably undermines the band for me, something which is my fault entirely but still an indubitable fact from my own perspective.

that gira seems to be pandering to this is understandable, yeah, but it's disappointing from someone who has seemed so steadfastly committed to his own idiosyncratic vision from the outset of his career. early swans didn't feel like a child's nightmare from fucking nickolodeon (which the last two records do, not so much my father) and that it is so theatrical does make me dislike it a bit considering how disconcertingly (and genuinely) intense something like filth or holy money was.

in the interests of full disclosure I am again drunk.

Hmmm. On one hand you really make me want to get those earlier Swans records. (I'm a Noisehead in general.) But Man, just because Gira has moved his style towards "songs" and groove, doesn't mean he is selling out or pandering, imho. TBK and Seer sound very steadfastly committed to a vision, which happens to come from a 60yr old vice a 30yr old. Do you want him to repeat himself? I don't hear cartoonish/nickelodeon when I hear these motherfuckers, but to each their own I suppose. (I have some issues with My Father which seem opposite to your concerns - I see My father as a tentative warmup towards the next two releases. It comes across as very restrained imho.)

my disc/live DVD was waiting for me at the house in the mailbox when I got home from work today. I am SOOOOOO fucking looking forward to sitting down with some brews and "watching" the DVD..

Saw the tracklist for the dvd, it's nearly a 2hr show. Fuck me, what a collection.

That is why I bought it, it was just $2 more, it was a no brainer. It was really the only reason I bought the CD version, the digital download was 13.98, the CD was 16.98 and the special edition with the DVD was 18.99.. It was like DUH!!!

Fuck it. Ordering this right fuckin now. My record store won't stock this special edition.

I would have bought the DVD by itself for $20, I look at it as the CD being free ;)

Also I'm glad I could help persuade you, you won't regret it in the least

much like The Seer I find myself gravitating more around the second disc than the first, though not enough to say one is necessarily better than another. On my ipod right now I only have disc two of The Seer, and its sounding like I will be stuck on disc 2 of To Be Kind in a similar way for the next foreseeable future

money is flesh in your hands

As great as the new batch of Swans material might be, nothing to me will compare to Children of God. Whether he will admit it or not, Gira's ego has definitely grown from all the P4K hype. Early Swans records were completely unpretentious and honest in their hatred. Plus I miss Jarboe. Perfect foil.

That is thing, these past two records don't seem to have any touch of loathing or hatred, the are almost optimistic, albeit in a Swans kind of way ;)

I'm watching the DVD tonight, didn't get a chance last night. This fucking song Kirsten Supine, especially when coming out of that beautiful mess of sound and feedback that was the ending minutes of She Loves Us.... shit. THAT alone has swallowed up my weekend.. I haven't felt this way about a particular riff since Shannon Wright "Commoner's Saint" or wait, I think this song came out more recently by her and affected me in a similar way.. Tax the Patients

it's not the shift in sound which has caused me to become slightly more dubious about new swans, but rather that he has really become consumed by a persona, which is so distinctly at odds with that brutally honest feeling which was central to early swans up to the burning world. those records feel like fucking exorcisms, akin to something like jandek or haino et al in that you're disconcerted by the fact that you're essentially listening in on the purging of a tormented individual's misery. there was no artifice to that, it was pure expression. and in that, it's not that I don't want him to repeat itself, more so that I don't feel post-children of god to be the same band, with that record itself to perhaps be the mid-point between the two disparate sounds. of course that isn't to say I dislike what came after, I mean die tur ist zu, soundtracks and swans are dead make up some of my favourite material of theirs. but it becomes more of the 'gira/jarboe' show at that point, it's so far apart from the early stuff. you're in for a fucking treat, but you'll see what I'm talking about there. as far as I'm concerned this is all a lot closer to angels of light, which I'm fine with, but it's not what got me into swans.

yeah but if I wanted that (which I don't and never will), I'd listen to like fucking godspeed or explosions in the sky or shania twain or some shit. I don't want that euphoric trash from swans, I want aural rape. swans always seemed so ideologically opposed to that, indeed they were like the total opposite, like audible nihilism, an immutable loathing of mankind.

Eh. Children Of God was such an inconsistent album. It does have one of the best 'track 1, side 1' songs ever though.

The title track was the first Swans song I liked (their first album I listened to was Filth, and this back when I considered Dinosaur Jr to be weird so good god I couldn't handle that shit). There's something so inspiring about the song Children of God though. That whole album has such an unforced "spiritual" quality to it that still blows my mind. The newer stuff, while great, I think is a bit more planned out and loses some of the brute nihilism as a result.