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I can't help but notice that there's been some Swans-lovin' going down on the old 'lith in various places (largely the Squalid Music thread), so...
Other than seeing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on The Chart Show (and ranting, with the authority only a 15-year-old is capable of, that it didn't MATTER how good it was, it was Joy Division, dammit, and you don't fuck with Joy Division, or you may as well actually BE Paul Young... an opinion I've thankfully largely grown out of) my first exposure to Swans was through the recommendation of my older sister's boyfriend (who to my teenaged self was something of a musical guru, having ACTUALLY SEEN loads of the legendary bands I could only listen to on the Peel show), who advised me to buy their latest album ("The Burning World"), and work backwards until I reached a point where they became unlistenable. So I bought "The Burning World", and worked backwards, and never found them unlistenable. From TBW's "Venus In Furs"-esque melodic decadence, back through the righteous fury of "Children Of God", the choral sludge of "Greed" and "Holy Money", the inexorable brutality of "Cop", all the way back to the lo-fi industrialism of the "Speak" EP... I loved it all. Obsessively.
Then I checked out the "Skin"/"World Of Skin" stuff...
...then came The Angels Of Light. Up until that point, "New Mind" had always been one of my Desert Island Discs, were I ever to become famous. Then I heard AOL's "New Mother", and the track "Angels Of Light" grabbed me by the balls, ripped them off and dragged them up and down my spine. The most beautiful arrangement... building from a single acoustic guitar chord, through strings, bells, all manner of stuff... it's magical. Then it stops. And only then do you realise the song hasn't even started yet. All that majesty, that wonderful music, was just by way of an intro. And it builds again, but with different instruments. And this time it's the song. And it's absolutely glorious.
I'm posting this while listening to AOL's album "How I Loved You" for the first time in a few months, and it's hard to imagine something further from, say, "Raping A Slave". But even at their most beautiful, the Angels... still have that relentlessness, that remorselessness that characterised all the Swans stuff.
Then I read the ace interview with Mr Gira in Terrorizer today, in which he claims his goal all along with his music has been to make people happy... I have to say, it's often worked in my case, but it's really not what you'd expect...
And apparently there's a new Angels album! That does make me happy. Very happy indeed.
So...
get with the Gira lovin'/hatin'. Here's yr starter. |
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