Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky (Young God)
4/5
By: Jamie Russell
You know you're dealing with a very different proposition when a band is lauded for their ability to nauseate. In fact, vomiting is generally stereotyped as more of a 'thumbs-down' event in music. But Swans are no ordinary rock band. Their early shows in the 80s, since described as beacons for the No Wave movement, were actually celebrated for being so loud, so aggressive and visceral, that audience members were often made ill in attendance, and gigs closed down without even a sniff of an encore. Or so goes the legend. It is, therefore, with trepidation that I test drive My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (their first album in 13 years). First I arm myself with a basin.
There is, no doubt, something very physical going on here. ‘No Words/No Thoughts’ is an onward march of heaving, industrial rhythms, lit by shrieking flares of guitar, like reptilian calls or the sirens of a motor city; at once synthetic and organic. This incarnation of Swans is richly synaesthetic, vivid sound that can be seen and felt – and above it sits the narrator, candidly teasing the soundscape into a frenzy. Michael Gira’s voice is religious and rootsy in tone - a travelling storyteller to Nick Cave’s ilk of burlesque preacher. And with the contrasting arrival of ‘Reeling The Liars In’ we are now under his watch, leaving the carnival-metropolis a moment, sitting instead among a chain-gang of sinners and evangelists. Voices that continue to haunt the rest of the record.
My Father Will Guide Me is a great ventriloquist’s act. The crackling keys that open ‘My Birth’, for instance, are gunfire or an alarm or perhaps just a piano. These are curiosities contrived to flirt with the darkest parts of imagination. They draw on paradigms in the cultural memory, often cinematic, from the World War II bombers that fly over ‘You Fucking People Make Me Sick’, to the far eastern wail of guitars in ‘Eden Prison’. There’s a masterful swagger to the record, a very knowing grasp of subjunctive imagery and a torrent of mimesis running right through.
Swans had moved to the less noisy, vomity end of post punk long before their 13 year hiatus, but it’s still an interesting counterpoint to draw on. Latter day Swans are less epileptic, steadier in pace and more ephemeral. It’s as if their playground has shifted from the body to the mind – acquiring the character of storyteller / narrator along the way as a culturally ‘understood’ character, a constancy in a challengingly chameleon landscape. Stand back far enough, and it’s easy to see My Father Will Guide Me as a sort of shared reminiscence - capably hitched up to sonic proportions and projected directly onto your mind’s eye.
Artists in this article: Swans
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