How is it that after 15 fucking years Michael Gira was capable of bringing back Swans, and not have it suck? Everyone knows that reunion albums are terrible, how did he pull it off? Is he a god? Why is he so based? I wanna be his little baby tampon boy
post-reunion swans is pretty mediocre
>>60995679
because he never really lost it with all his side projects in the meantime
also having a fairly fresh lineup helped
He didn't "go back to his roots" or treat his previous works like things he had to hearken back to.
>>60995679
it sounds different
>>60995679
Because his music doesn't rely on catchy rhythms and melodies which are demonstrably harder to write as you get older. His music relies on shocking/interesting sounds and fade in/outs of various riffs. He's a rock version of Frank Ticheli. The Swans are gimmicky and overrated, though they definitely did keep up their sound though.
He didn't
30 years after the Swans gave their first masterpiece the good news was that the world had finally caught up and by 2013 the Swans were widely recognized as one of the greatest rock bands ever. The bad news is that it was time for Gira to monetize the name that had yielded no commercial return for so long. Hence the double album The Seer
For a two-hour album, there are precious few ideas, and they are mostly (very) antiquated, bordering on the ridiculous when they borrow Sonic Youth-ian guitar repetition for the ten-minute Mother of the World and when they indulge in the free-jazz jamming of 93 Ave B Blues, or when a loop of tolling bells can't do more than trigger a monotonous litany in the eight-minute Avatar.
Needless to say, the very same critics and publications that ignored the Swans when they were releasing one masterpiece after the other hailed this mediocre senile work as a masterpiece 30 years later, finding all sorts of hidden meanings in what was simply an astute sellout.
The double-disc To Be Kind (Young God, 2014) does not fully redeem the generic mediocrity of Seer but at least scales down the pomp or infuses it with more real deas. Nonetheless, the Swans remain unrecognizable (note for the younger generations: no, your parents were not listening to this "stuff", they were listening to Filth and Cop, much darker "stuff").
The album is often annoyingly redundant and predictable, but then again those are precisely the main qualities that one admires in wallpaper and in supermarket muzak.
Scruffy pls
>>60995679
Look at that confident embrace of those women too, total lack of overhand like so many keks these days.
>>60996161
godammmit scruffy
Because the sound of new swans doesn't rely on some kind of retro aesthetic like 90's emo or 80;s post punk and actually does something different or expands on what swans did previously. It also came right on time with the "indie" boom of 2009/2010. It manages to be weird for normies but accessible which intentionally or not panders to the p4k/fantano crowds. Also mikey doesn't really give a fuck.
