Swans – My Father Will Guide Me a Rope Up to the Sky

One central salient feature is the cascading sounds that make your body feel like it’s levitating when you’re inside it. I wanted to experience that feeling again. Making something that is so much bigger than yourself that you feel like you are inside the mouth of God. (Michael Gira)

The thing is about making end of year lists is that unless you’re actually a professional music critic (and probably not even then) you really don’t have enough time to properly digest the work by the end of that year. This is especially true when records come out at the tail end of it and you’re still busy giggling about Rick Ross. My top ten from last year is basically garbage right now, I reviewed five on this “blog” but I did make a list of 20 which I’m almost ashamed to even dig up. I’m sure most of it is fine, Deerhunter, Kanye, Titus, Black Angels; I still stand behind those. I heard Das Racist sometime in December and said WOW THIS IS GREAT!!! and then sometime in January, after a few more hits on my mp3 player and wearing out the two or three decent songs I realized that no, this is really shallow bullshit and how could I have been so silly? But, at least it wasn’t Sleigh Bells. Throughout it all, pinned to my mp3 player, a record continued to make groaning, malevolent, apocalypitc sounds at me. It was spitting in anger that I would choose Foals and Das Racist for recognition over Swans’ triumphant return. I was wrong, profoundly so. Swans is one of the best bands in the damn world.

My Father Will Guide Me a Rope Up to the Sky is just about the darkest fucking record imaginable, and possibly the best release of 2010. It is music for the end times, it’s a funeral dirge for America, it’s the soundtrack for an especially bleak Werner Herzog flick (I’ve been thinking of swapping My Father Will Guide… for the music in Lessons of Darkness just for s&gs). The opener, “No Words/No Thoughts,” begins with overlapping chiming of church bells until overlaying guitar effects that sound like buzzsaws, insane mumbling, and unholy screaming dissect the chaotic church bell motif just before the kettle drums rumble in. By the midpoint of this epic piece in the key of armageddon, the snare drums are rat-tat-tating machine gun fire and the hairswinging rhythm of the guitars almost fools you into thinking this metal. It’s not. It’s what metal wishes it could be, if it wasn’t hopelessly corny. Even the most dire Neurosis record withers in the face of the brutal glare of Swans.

Swans goes way back, to the days of the late 70s and early 80s when NYC’s then hipsters flocked around Sonic Youth and the No Wave scene. Swans opened for Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth opened for Swans. Thurston Moore was even Swans’ second bass player occasionally. This band has serious roots reaching into the very genesis of what we now call alternative rock. The thing about Swans is that not only is the music dark, oppressive, aggressive and hostile, so is frontman and architecht Michael Gira. To the point, I’ve heard stories about him shouting at audiences for taking pictures with their cellphones and spitting on moshers to get them to stop being dipshits. Both of these things make him a personal asshole icon/hero to me, but his particularities are what limited his brand of funerary noise rock to the fringes of the music listner’s collective ear balls. He’s known to publically acknowledge that his live shows test people’s patience, they tend to start with over an hour of deafening, kaleidascopic noise effects, which verge of course on the maniacally bleak; which makes me slightly gooey to think about. The albums are much tighter, more practiced and this one in particular is masterfully composed, coupling thrashing noise with quiet tracks and even a dash of a cappella, especially on the closing track “Little Mouth.”

The second track, “Reeling the Liars In” begins gently, simple guitar strumming with a deep chorus of harmonizing male voices before Gira drawls, “We are reeling the liars in/we are removing their face/collecting their skin/we are reeling the liars in.” The song is almost light, because of the hum-along chorus and simple arrangements, it’s as playful and pop as Swans gets at least: “Here is my tongue, now cut out my sin.” Gira’s voice is perfect for this; rich and heavy with a smoker’s timbre like latter day Leonard Cohen without the romanticism. “Jim” is transcendant, the choral theme is continued here and is used to create a sonic texture that rises and gains intensity to the point where it becomes almost trancendant and cathartic. The sunnily titled “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” utilizes a dual harmony between Gira’s daughter and cult icon Devendra Barnhardt that collapses into deafening piano smashes that focus on the resonance of a dozen bass keys on a grand piano reverberating angrily into the abyss. Off key horns join the fray and it sounds like frieght trains going off the tracks. Folks, this is about as dark as things get.

“Inside Madeline” however, is my favorite track. It starts with a lengthy bass heavy intro that’s cross cut with similar themes found in the opening track: squealing, off-kilter and hardly recognizable guitars, droning rhythm, Thor Harris (an Austinite and member of Shearwater) thunders away on the drums as the song rises in intensity, which seems to make it even bleaker as static and squealy guitars rebound against each other like a droning hive of mechanical insects. Suddenly, it breaks. Each layer is stripped away one by one starting with a mute on the drums, a dramatic shift that forces you to focus on the rest of the sonic landscape. As the music ebbs away, you notice each individual component that was fighting each other for space in the drone.This is a tremendous touch, and one that carries through most of these songs. There’s something new for your ears to notice almost every time the record is played. Gira’s vocals come in at their deepest rasp, as strings join him, and the song finishes out with a softer feel. “Clutching like snow to the end of the vine/you are free, free do do nothing.”

I think that line is a central key in understanding the music of Swans and Gira. It strikes me as being deterministic, humans are the snow, clutching to the vine of the earth. Our fall is quite inescapable, the snow will fall to the earth/into the void. Yet, we are still free to do anything which in the scope of the impossibly vast universe is exactly nothing. However, it important to note that this is no reason to give up on everything and collectively kill ourselves. Gira himself says, “I’m not cynical or nihilistic. If I was nihilistic or cynical, I would have stopped working years ago. I am willfully naïve and open to experience. I am very careful not to accept beliefs just because it feels good to believe them.” That’s last statement is the crux, some facts about the world do not feel good, but they are still nonetheless the reality. This is the music of Swans. Punishingly loud, bleak, dark and brooding yet ultimately cathartic. We are indeed free to do nothing. Determinists speak of the liberating nature of knowing our bodies are governed by laws of physics and our own natural processes, that we are essentially “meat robots” with consciousness. Knowing this, they say, is liberating. Free. To do nothing. And everything.