#SWANS LUNACY FULL#Not to imply that listening to a Swans record is a joyless experience, but one that requires you to immerse yourself fully in it to reap its full reward. This is music that requires concentration and effort. Make no mistake, this is not something you put on in the background while you’re doing the dishes. The final phase of the tune is centred around a snake-like melody, symbolically located somewhere between the Middle East and the American Deep South, accompanied by a fittingly cryptic vocal from Gira. ‘The Seer’ is an unrelentingly bleak excursion into repetition, giving way after twenty odd minutes of increasingly powerful vamping on a single chord to a baleful harmonica solo, backed up by hazy pedal steel and shimmering strings, before finally transforming into something resembling traditional song structure around the 18 minute mark. The first and last three tracks on the album inevitably function as a buttress to the enormity of the 32 minute long title track, an incredible work of art in its own right. Soon, the almost biblical chanting of the vocal melody appears and the song becomes something else entirely, eventually plateauing into a bittersweet acoustic dirge, with the vocals repeating ‘Your childhood is over’ seemingly endlessly. Opener ‘Lunacy’ initially recalls the glory days of Sonic Youth, who of course emerged from beneath Swans’ wings in the New York No-Wave scene of the early 80s. Gira has stated that The Seer is ‘the culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I’ve ever made, been involved in or imagined’, and indeed, the nihilistic cacophony of the early Swans records, the more sombre acoustic-based sound of Gira’s ‘Drainland’ album and Angels of Light project, as well as the spirit of unrestrained experimentalism that runs throughout all of the above, are detectable on the 11 songs that comprise this album. The Seer is a towering accomplishment from a band with a long and rich history, which makes 2010’s excellent My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky seem almost a footnote in comparison. Never ones to shy away from experimentation, the reformed Swans return with a 2 hour long album of haunting, majestic sounds from the strange mind of Michael Gira.
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