This is The Seer, a masterpiece of post-rock and experimental composition that burrows into subterranean worlds and speaks with ultimate truth about spirituality, childhood, and the madness of the future of the mankind.
SWANS LUNACY FULL
God, love, death, and the mind - some of Gira’s preferred subjects - have all been extolled and damned in Swans’ music over the years, and like some masked bacchanalia that’s going just fine until someone pours blood all over themselves and starts screaming to the night sky about being choked to death by a snake, it often gets uncomfortable.īut just as Swans once cursed the sun for shining too much light and revealing dark crannies of the world, they know that real truth and transcendence is only unearthed from beneath the surface when music is drilled at full bore. The ringleader, Michael Gira, has somewhat disavowed the idea that Swans are a bleak band, though you’d be hard-pressed to find evidence of that on the surface of their previous material. Repetition is a wholly committed search.įor 30 years, Swans have been searching for something through ceaseless abrasion, droning atonalities, and dour words. Repetition is a jackhammer trying to wrest truth from the muddy waters of the subconscious. The volatile act of repetition yields all kinds of results ranging from pure truth and ecstasy to violence and lunacy, but the overarching theme of repetition is that it looks for what is beyond the surface. Watch a pendulum swing back and forth and fall into hypnosis. Have a drop of water fall on your head for seven hours and it’s torture. Intone a mantra or prayer every morning and it can be a spiritual guide. Its like: Say a word over and over and it can lose its meaning and succumb to semantic satiation. The song doesnt lift, it doesnt pound, it just twists and screws and digs. Instead of crescendoing to some sweeping catharsis, the two chords remain steady and resolute, never resolving.
The interval once thought to actually be demonic heaves back and forth, collapsing and recollecting like throwing a two-ton burlap sack of noise. The bulk of the 32 minute title track on The Seer is two chords, one tritone apart from each other, played over and over again.
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