THE CRUEL AND WONDERFUL WORLD OF SWANS’ ‘TO BE KIND’

For a period of time, Myspace rebranded its social media presence as a music-oriented content site. I both wrote and contributed to a number of pieces published there, all now scrubbed from online existence. In their absence, I share selections of some of that work, albeit in submitted draft versions, sometimes with draft titles, as opposed to edited form.

This piece was originally published at Myspace in May 2014 and later expunged from their site. If you are the copyright holder and wish to have the piece removed from this page, please contact the site owner.


What's the difference between To Be Kind and The Seer? About three minutes.

There's a kernel of truth in that cheap joke. This is, after all, Michael Gira's second consecutive two-hour double album for his revived Swans, a band that never stuck around any particular scene long enough to be defined or confined by it. The expectations for how to consume something of such immense size and inherent grandeur seems more akin to cinema than home listening. Auteur directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Lars Von Trier fill the art house seats with aesthetes and insiders anxious to soak in their latest protracted efforts, yet even the most benign summer blockbusters nowadays sprawl out beyond the two hour mark. (The Amazing Spider-Man 2 lasts nearly two-and-a-half hours.) It's the pacing, you see, and the patience that keeps people from marching on Hollywood and Cannes with ticket stubs as torches.

Our willingness to subject ourselves to compulsory prolonged listening has dwindled over the decades. We no longer need to flip the record or cassette over to hear the second half, unless of course we choose to as righteous format audiophiles. Songs come streaming on demand, discographies a mere skip or click away. Compact discs, once ripped to MP3 or FLAC, make great coasters. By today's fidgety smartphone standards, it comes off as ludicrous to expect someone to sit quietly and just, like, listen for 122 minutes to such a difficult record.

Too much value has been placed on repeat listenability in rock music, the byproduct of a singles-centric culture. Unwieldy artistic projects like Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle films or William Basinski's multi-volume Disintegration Loops series of drone pieces have tremendous value even though most who hail them have likely never experienced the work in full. Many will, at best, give To Be Kind one full listen, and likely not an uninterrupted one. Repeat attempts may be made, but will likely fail the minute a new text message pops up. An artist in the perilous predicament of having too much to say, musically, should not need to compromise to accommodate the listener's schedule or cater to his or her attention span. The hope is that, despite the preciousness of time, the work itself remains there for whenever the consumer is ready to receive it.

Right from the start it's crucial to note that To Be Kind is but a sentence fragment, a fractured phrase shrewdly severed from its operative but implied qualifier. The reference, Nick Lowe's jangly 1979 Top 40 single "Cruel To Be Kind," embodies a dark sort of humor, and that so-called right measure of cruelty and kindness seems to drive Gira and his band on this latest endeavor. This new album is decidedly less diverse than its domineering predecessor, truer perhaps to that classic Swans record The Great Annihilator (1995) and the primal primacy of its '80s no wave antecedents. Despite being marginally longer than 2012's The Seer, the latest Swans record feels like a course correction from the prior record's monolithic smother, choosing a shattering duality of swirling build-ups and guitar catharsis.

To Be Kind is the sort of noise rock record you'd expect from a man who's been willfully immersed in the dark for close to four decades. Gira, who is 60 years old, has had enough time on this earth to draw influence and inspiration from Haitian revolutionaries and dead bluesmen alike. Indeed, a dank, red blues defines much of the album, as on "Just A Little Boy (for Chester Burnett)," which name checks the legendary Howlin' Wolf and slowly creeps via jagged crescendo to something bestial and beyond reason. No shabby-shoed simulacrum, this is sincere and suffering and sensational.

Swans’ current comfort with this soft-loud dynamic is hard won, a product of so many years embracing one or the other, from the urban savagery of Time Is Money (Bastard) to the filthy folk of White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity. The title track, tucked in neatly at the album’s end, begins as a cool, unsettling breeze that foretells a thunderstorm. After piano softness and earnest intonations, that inevitable tempest erupts in crashing bangs and orchestral chaos. Interestingly, with some satisfying exceptions, Gira eschews the depth of his evocative voice so beloved of his post-Swans project Angels Of Light, now as content to bark and yelp again as he is to croon and brood.

The 34-minute double-wide suite "Bring The Sun / Toussaint L'Ouverture" makes for a slightly off-center centerpiece, an extension of Gira’s solar obsession, one which stems from 1989’s “God Damn The Sun” to 1991’s “Song To The Sun” to 1995’s “I Am The Sun” and onwards. The first part presents itself as a burning dirge, like a house on fire that burns to the last ember before your helpless watery eyes. It is The Great Annihilator self-immolating, reduced to ash. The latter, more theatrical and cheekily accented with a carefully placed apostrophe, finds Gira with sulfur on the tongue, bellowing Haiti's national motto and other phrases in revolt in a sort of historical reenactment, galloping horses and all. It is a raga for the dead, a threnody perhaps, a psychedelic journey narrated by a raving lizard king that, appropriately, ends in flames.

Throughout To Be Kind, Gira employs his generational peers like Norman Westberg, L.E.S. chanteuse Little Annie Anxiety, and former Cop Shoot Cop drummer Phil Puleo along with some experimentally-minded youngsters such as St. Vincent and Cold Specks frontwoman Al Spx. This selection of guests and collaborators indicates something other than single-mindedness. It’s a shared experience intended to transfix and bewilder, to hook the jaw and compel you along for both pleasure and pain. If you can muster the strength and patience to do it at least once, it’s an odyssey free of the trappings of the modern world. You can respond to that email later.