release - swans - my father will guide me up a rope to the sky

type: album

released: 23rd september 2010

label: young god

genre: no wave, noise rock, post-punk, folk, ambient

It could be argued that there was no call for this album to be made, as the last one under the Swans banner happened 14 years ago, and founder Michael Gira has been recording albums pretty much every two years since then with strongly neofolk directions under Angels of Light. Jarboe, who shared songwriting duties for over a decade is nowhere to be seen.

After the announcement of the so-called reactivation of Swans in January this year, certain questions had to be asked. Is it simply a way for an ageing musician to make money from a now-revered name? Is that an inherently bad thing? Perhaps more importantly, is it worse to reunite for the money alone and never enter the studio again - something we've seen a lot of in recent years - or to record another album and risk tarnishing the brand? It's clear that Gira is taking a risk here: the funding for the recording was found largely through Gira's limited run solo album and live DVD I Am Not Insane released earlier this year, many of the songs later appearing on this album. So if this isn't totally Swans, rest assured that it is sincere.

Here we have assorted members of Angels of Light, Norman Westberg from the original Swans lineup and a few wildcards, including Devendra Banhart and Mercury Rev's Grasshopper backing Gira up. But can it really work? How could this be a worthy successor to Soundtracks for the Blind, which totalled well over two hours across two discs, or even going-out live album Swans are Dead, with its bruising, tortuous opener Feel Happiness?

Opener No Words/No Thoughts begins with some rather ominous chimes followed by a bit of proverbial muscle-flexing of the kick drum and cymbals. It stands at a comparably tame nine and a half minutes, but it rocks as hard in that time as anything they've done. And what's more, it tells us that Gira is fully in the Swans mindset and fully in command of his band, their screeching guitars and pounding drums setting out sonic caverns for Gira to fill with his baritone diatribes, which hit as hard as ever. It's a lot to take in on the first listen, but it's probably the most exciting thing on here.

Reeling the Liars In is bluesy and folky and funereal, sounding much closer to the Angels of Light end of the spectrum, and it memorable for its damning lyrics. The rest of the album fits somewhere between these first two polar opposites and standouts. Inside Madeline even seems to cover the ground of both in a single span. You Fucking People Make Me Sick may have an ugly title and some novel playing of the piano but it's a beautiful song, featuring neo-hippie and New Weird Annoyance Devendra Banhart on vocals. My Birth has a punk vibe that recalls some of the more lo-fi Swans recordings of the 80s, while Eden Prison has a noisy crescendo that wouldn't have anything like as much impact if it had been attempted with those earlier recording techniques. Little Mouth is another folk song, both haunting and cinematic, and ending on Gira's dark voice alone to close the album. But as the backing band fade away and become irrelevant again we have to remind ourselves that this really is Swans.

So we have a brooding and schizophrenic album that, while showcasing a variety of sounds and styles that Gira has picked up over a career spanning four decades, is actually quite consistent in quality. It doesn't sit up there with the best of Swans' material, which at its height felt like a shocking burst of raw anger, but it has energy, and if its sole purpose is to set the band up with a great collection of songs to play later this year, then it's done a fine job.

Swans - You Fucking People Make Me Sick