Swans – To Be Kind
The release of the thirteenth studio album by experimental collective Swans, titled To Be Kind, marks the group’s third full-length album since the end of their ten-year breakup. Following 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky and 2012’s The Seer, this brand new material takes their characteristically dark sound into new territories in the painstaking, sprawling two-hour runtime of To Be Kind.
Offering even a summary of the group’s history (and their influence on contemporary rock) would require a whole article in itself, but Michael Gira’s compositional style has flourished into one of rock’s few living geniuses since the group’s roots in the 1980s “no wave” scene in New York. A jarring binary between classicism and primacy is crucial to Swans’ music, and the first two tracks of the album, “Screen Shot” and “Just a Little Boy” effectively mark the importance of this binary. By setting the tone of repetition and dark, brooding sounds against flourishes of grating guitar noise.
To Be Kind is one of the group’s most literate albums – most evident in the staggering thirty-four minute track “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Overture”, an ominous, morbid pseudo-tribute to the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804. The droning bass lines and crushing drums that hold the movements together are marked by sharp, noisy accents that envelop the listener, almost by force, into the sheer brutality of the piece and, by extension, into the brutality of the historical context. With regards to the “literariness” of the piece, there is a historical memory at work here marked by trauma, and addressing such a concern with the honesty and viciousness that Gira confronts it with is a difficult and admirable thing.
The second part of the album begins with the seventeen minute “She Loves Us”, and harkens back to the band’s earlier work, as does the rest of the second side as a whole. “Oxygen” is perhaps the album’s most accessible song, and the penultimate song “Nathalie Neal” is an entrancing work of minimalist bells and pianos that grows into a bass-driven, gloom-rock powerhouse track. The title track that closes the record, “To Be Kind” wraps up the last hour and fifty minutes of material with a wrenching, gothic-tinged piece that sounds almost like an Edward Gorey book put into music. Again, a sort of binary is at work here – the chaos lurking under the surface of tranquility breaks out with little warning, and the effect is undeniably powerful.
Altogether, the album is not an easy listen and is a difficult one to review; no different than (more or less) the entirety of their output. The songs are long, unbearably bleak – the narrative techniques are shocking, and the lyrical content is often obscure and difficult to digest. But for the curious and empathetic listener, Gira and co. demand attention, and the reward is at once a sensually intense, cinematic journey into the purest of darkness, a landmark musical event, and easily one of 2014’s finest albums thus far. Swans has certainly always been a “thinking person’s” band, and To Be Kind offers endless rewards to those inquisitive (and/or brave) enough to listen.