[rayword45]

Day 324: The Glowing Man by Swans

Last time I reviewed a Swans album, nobody knew about the whole rape scandal. I'm gonna try to separate art from artist but if you have been living under a rock when it comes to noise or post-rock, read up now. And stop supporting this guy financially. I deliberately bought second-hand tickets because I'm not giving this guy a cent of my money.

For the record, it's probably still horribly immoral to add to his head count at the concert but whatever, maybe I'll join in on some heckling.

Anyways, onto the music, this is definitely in the same vein as the other reunion Swans albums, but it's a lot more drone and a lot less aggro, with ambient textures and folky instrumentation galore. As a result, it feels more repetitive than To Be Kind but this actually works in the album's favor. Two hours passes by much faster when the drones soothe you rather than agitate you. Almost nothing here is grating or boring. I don't like to compare albums since benchmarks are almost always stupid, but if we were to compare the longest track on this album, the title track, and Bring The Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture from To Be Kind, the shitty latter track overstayed it's welcome within the first 10 minutes of its sloppy Umphrey's McIndustrial crescendocore nonsense. The Glowing Man, on the other hand, uses much more repetition in spite of a perceived lack of structure, creating a hypnotic atmosphere. It also avoids the cliche of crescendo-core that was all too prominent in the last few Swans albums and relies instead on abrupt volume and texture shifts, with less corny vocals pervading everywhere. Basically, this track is fucking unique, and that makes it a lot more enjoyable than more cliche Explosions In The Sky-esque dime-a-dozen post-rock tracks.

There's more to an album than one song, but to do even MORE comparison (ugh), the ordering on this album is phenomenal. We start with a quick 1-2 punch, move through floaty hypnosis, and end with Finally, Peace which is a good ending even if it seems somewhat trite at times. The artwork is... still terrible but whatever. If there's one really conspicuous flaw, its the vocals. Gira was never a particularly strong singer, but at least in projects like Angels of Light or many tracks from Soundtracks For The Blind the vocals fit the music well. Here, it sounds like Gira's trying to emulate an angsty 90s grunge-crooner and it's horribly cheesy all the time. Luckily, this is not as big a problem as it could be, because most of the time this album stick to instrumental bits.

If this is truly the end of this incarnation of Swans, it was a damn fine cup of coffee. Wait what? What the fuck am I saying?

Good ending to a good band with a shitbag frontman, but hey that's rock music for you.

Best Track: The Glowing Man
Rating: 8/10