Swans debuted in the early 1980s with the starkest and ugliest music imaginable: Nerve-shreddingly slow and plug-your-ears loud, somewhere between no wave and doom metal, with lyrics that viewed humanity as a sheep-like mass that deserved whatever horror came its way. Melody, nuance, and gentleness came later, but by then it was too late. Swans' rep as unrepentant industrial brutalists had stuck. Sure, it was unfair, but that's what happens when you introduce yourself with a sound that singular and abrasive.
Swans frontman/mastermind Michael Gira was notoriously unhappy about that rep. His early records made their point-- music can sometimes hurt, and sometimes that hurt is weirdly pleasurable-- and by the late 80s his interests lay elsewhere. Sure his lyrics remained oppressive, abject, and generally icky, but his bellowing and moaning became a mournful croon. Humanity and beauty kept leaking in, almost despite the band's best intentions. As the 90s went on, Swans albums became as much about exploring gorgeous (if disquieting) ambient texture as crushing heads. Gira's songs blossomed from skeletal rhythmic sketches into lush epics that predicted a lot of post-rock.
But Swans' music, whatever the period, was driven by a philosophy of no compromises. Gira wanted the freedom to change direction whenever he wished. Swans fans and critics refused to shut up about his earlier, more brutal records, as if Gira were Woody Allen raised on Marquis de Sade. So he did the only reasonable thing an intractable man could do: He killed the band in 1997, dumped its historical baggage, and tried to enjoy the freedom of no expectations in a new project, Angels of Light.
Perhaps 13 years was enough time to put Swans into perspective, though, because here's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Its existence is surprising to say the least, especially considering Gira's sneering dismissal of the whole idea of bands reuniting. What's less surprising is that Gira's shifted musical directions yet again, though his voice and the inimitable end-times vibe make My Father instantly recognizable as a Swans album.
I understand why Swans' music, even the later and more melodic period, can be off-putting to those who prefer their music more humane and humorous. Gira can be a blackly funny fucker, but to truly enjoy Swans, it does help to have some affection for music that's, well, bleak. Really bleak. Theatrically bleak. Because however funny or lovely or melodramatically stirring he can be, there's always going to be a core of desolation to Gira's songwriting.
My Father reinforces that fact, but it does so with a stomping, swinging, snarling live-band urgency that sounds little like Swans' last album, 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind, which leaned heavily on the band's love for tape loops and ambient soundscapes. My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues. The musicians sound go-for-the-throat savage after their long absence, as if Gira presented them with a batch of blackened lyrics and they couldn't wait to pound the songs into shape.
In other words, My Father grooves, and grooves hard. "Eden Prison" features one of Gira's most menacing performances in recent years, but really his snarling contempt is a bonus given the intensity the band brings to the galloping rhythm. Unlike the keyboard-driven Soundtracks material, which often had to be radically reconstructed for the band's final tour (as heard on 1998's posthumous live album, Swans are Dead), you can imagine the reconstituted Swans taking these new songs to the stage and kicking them out as-is.
Gira's new songs are obviously far more refined than band's bash-and-groan 80s material. (Just about every song ever written is more refined than something like 1984's "Raping a Slave".) There are still touches of the Soundtracks era and its atmospherics, though it's usually restricted to intros and outros. But this is the closest Gira's come in decades to the band's old immediacy, intensity, and brute force. "My Birth" is traditional hard rock filtered through Swans' drone-happy sensibility, the one to play for Queens of the Stone Age fans. And while "No Words/No Thoughts" opens the album with a moody wash of church bells, it immediately drops into the kind of swampy lurch that once made Swans heroes in the sludge metal community.
But if Gira got his Swans groove back, he also got his Swans bile back. This album is the antithesis of 2010's gooey let's-all-be-friends chillwave fun. The only way My Father would make sense on a beach is if nuclear winter had broken out. After all, there's a song here called "You Fucking People Make Me Sick", which sets a new standard for Gira's spit-in-your-eye venom. It is also sung, in part, by Gira's three-year-old daughter (she duets with Devendra Banhart) and opens with what sounds like a didgeridoo. That's Gira's kind of comedy. He always seems to having the most fun when he's at his most sardonic, and when he's at his most sardonic, he's also at his most memorable.
A lot of people have died in Swans songs over the years. (They've also been abused, degraded, violated, and made to wish they were dead.) On My Father, there's "Reeling the Liars In", a full-scale moral cleansing where E**very Liar on Earth, or at least as many as Gira can get his hands on, is loaded onto a pyre and set ablaze. It's the slightest song on the album, and the most vicious, and also the catchiest. I only mention it here at the end only to let new listeners know what they're in for when Gira's in a good mood. Longtime Swans fans are, I'm sure, already smiling.
