Swans
To Be Kind

THE REVIEW

I associate any song by the Swans with a building under construction. Layers upon layers of bricks, lime, cement, metal slowly melding into solid matter. A reinforced concrete wall impossible to knock down. To Be Kind, released in May, is the thirteenth work of the band led by the zombie-god Michael Gira and is a massively heavy and solid masterpiece. A stone encapsulating thirty years of career, a boulder containing all of Gira’s crazy genius. A cerebral, schizophrenic, and delirious genius. Two dark and spectral hours where chaotic repetition and sonic heaviness make love tirelessly.

"Screen Shot" arrives eerie, slow, and low. Based on a hypnotic bass line, this first track of eight minutes builds minute by minute, instrument by instrument. Gira, like a dead man risen from the grave, lists words without a precise connection. Disjointed words that give a ghostly sense of apathy and inner void. Words that eventually explode on us, tearing us apart.

"Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett)" is the Swans’ tribute to the king of blues, Howlin' Wolf. A piece lasting twelve minutes and forty seconds, marked by expansive atmospheres and a slow mud and tar-stained blues march. But the beating heart of the album is undoubtedly "Bring The Sun/Touissant L'Ouverture", a 34-minute suite inspired by the story of François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the Afro-American revolutionary who, at the end of the eighteenth century, managed to free the Haitian people from French slavery. Michael Gira screams all his love/hate towards religion and dogmas, wrapped in terrifying and captivating drones that penetrate our brains like cold sharp blades.

A macabre and hallucinatory dance that is "She Loves Us!", chock-full of white noise and razor-sharp guitars and dark enchanted mantras. The Swans return to the loud madness of their albums from the nineties, leaving behind the folk and country openings that characterized the two previous albums (the monolithic "The Seer" from 2012 and the lighter "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To The Sky" from 2010). In "Oxygen", the level of noise surpasses the atmosphere and explodes into outer space. The almost free-jazz beat of the track, which at times recalls Primus’s delirium, is uncontrollable.

Disorder, anarchy, chaos, tumult, madness, din, hallucination. All this and much more is To Be Kind. The thirteenth incredible masterpiece of a band that has never lowered its guard, that has never lowered the level of their music. At sixty, Michael Gira confirms himself as the king of the darkest and loudest rock, the zombie king returned to life to enthrall us with his Art. The Swans are still among us, the Swans sing from the underworld but never die.

Long live the Swans.