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  • Real Love

    ALP58

    Artist: Swans

    Label: Atavistic

    Swans are complex, surreal, terrifying, intense, beautiful. . . Their music and lyrics, more than any other band, consistently sends tremors through my entire being. This is bone-chilling, soul-crushing music. It will leave you haunted, yet mesmerized. Listen to it, feel it ripple through you, feel it tear you apart, feel it simultaneously destroy and save you. . .
    This band has taken music to a place, a dimension, that no other band has had the courage, the passion, or the calling to undertake. Swans preserve music as a form of art. They make music because they need to make music. They are unafraid of being different, unafraid of experimenting and pushing music to extreme boundaries. . .
    Too many modern bands exist for profit - they become nothing more than formulaic, cookie-cutter bands that have lost their sense of style. They feel that they must conform to the preferences of the mainstream in order to feel accepted in a society that hungers for fame and profit. . . and yet the loss is great: Musical talent suffers and variety becomes a rare gem. This is not so with Swans. I commend them on their courage to create music that will not be embraced by the general public.
    This is the music of nightmares. It will never cease to make you think. This is music to read Dostoevsky, Kafka, Sartre, and Hamsun to. Live by it. Let Swans take over.

  • Feel Good Now

    ALP135

    Artist: Swans

    Label: Atavistic

    At the time, being the first of the many semi-official bootlegs and live releases that Swans put out over the years, Feel documents the 1987 European tour for Children of God, recorded quite well on a professional walkman by the band's sound engineer. The track list exclusively focuses on Children material, so the album has much of the same general variety as its parent release, though all of the edges are a little rougher. "Blood and Honey," for example, maintains the synth-string arrangements from the album as well as Jarboe's low, haunting vocals, but the louder instrumental breaks have a stronger power here. In the meantime, already overpowering songs like "New Mind" and "Beautiful Child" rage all that much harder in a live arena, with Gira holding little back, if at all. At the same time, a tune like "Trust Me" maintains the newer Gira's commanding-yet-controlled croon amidst the more textured, elegant arrangement, though he definitely starts to let himself go more towards the end. Naming every highlight would take nearly forever, but special mention has to be made of "Children of God," featuring a fantastic call-and-response vocal tradeoff between Jarboe and Gira while the band brilliantly backs them up, and versions of "Sex God Sex" and especially "Blind Love," which make the album versions seem like gentle walks in the park by comparison. Another definite bonus on Feel is the demonstration of Swans' hitherto hard-to-find sense of humor: "Willy in Ravensburg" is a r...