SWANS
O2 Academy, Bristol | April 6th
Since their 2010 reformation Michael Gira’s Swans have re-established a concrete line-up and a reputation as a truly important band. With the release of last year’s unequivocal, genreless masterpiece The Seer, interest peaked further, and soaring ticket sales for this event prompted a venue upgrade from the Arnolfini to the O2 Academy. Tonight’s crowd is a meeting of age-old devotees and those intoxicated by that latest, sublime effort.
Opening with the unreleased To Be Kind, clouds of murky, enveloping ambience, slide guitar murmurs and sheets of droning guitar come gushing over our collective, reverent heads. Immediately, Gira takes the helm as a clear, messianic focal point. His silver hair scraped down to his shoulders, clad head-to-toe in black, face fixed in a meeting of generosity and malevolence as he sneers “there are millions and millions of stars in your eyes.” It’s profoundly severe, gothic in its grandiosity and utterly entrancing.
The first crash of sheer volume is purging, epiphanic, grotesque. Your whole body is engulfed in pinpricks. As minutes, tens of minutes pass, a thick, muscular rhythm is formed, moving you, both physically and cerebrally. All six members of Swans lurch as one into the fucked, gammy-legged gallop of Mother of the World. The slanted riff is drilled into each individual for what seems like an age, dual drummers Thor Harris and Phil Puleo’s percussive strikes finding their counterparts in Gira’s morose groans. The perfectly controlled aural disarray is constantly centred on him, his ragdoll arms conducting each element, decorating the hissing discord with flourishes of trombone (courtesy of Harris) or those ascending wails of Christoph Hahn’s lap steel.
There’s no denying the sound here is somewhat divisive. It requires, or even demands, investment. Occasionally, when we emerge from the reverie of those endless crashes of dissonance, where Gira repeats his single jarring chord leaps into infinity, certain patches of the room have visibly dispersed. Perhaps the strongest reactions come for the more nightmarish, industrial moments. Coward, from 1986’s Holy Money, comes complete with a sickening crunch that some of the elders among the crowd greet with a roar. Gira stalks the stage, leaning close to Hahn and screaming in his face as he replicates the sound in squealing, searing tones.
This is clarity through repetition. Pauses gape as those chords ring out, pauses so long that Gira can suck deep from a bottle of water before another deluge. He triumphantly switches sheets on his music stand between each song, but it’s surely compulsive; he never glances in its direction once the songs commence. He is these songs, he exists through them. He summons noise and it follows, he gestures for silence and it descends.
The evening’s most monumental piece comes as we approach the end of the two-hour-plus set, in the form of the title track of The Seer. As its warped shuffle uncoils, cyclical and unyielding, Gira staggers forwards. As he does so it suddenly becomes apparent that he hasn’t uttered a word in around half an hour. When his mouth engulfs the microphone and he emits a guttural grunt from the pit of his stomach it’s devastatingly powerful, almost grossly involving and physical. The investment is no longer optional. He howls in tongues, clawing at his torso, slashing his finger across his throat. You learn to drink in the volume, bask in it in an almost masochistic sense. And as chimes ring out across low-end surges of noise, it feels primal and ancient.
Swans gather at the front of the stage, drained and elated, and all six members bow deeply as one, as if a continuation of those clubbing crashes. Repeated forever, beating in time.
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Words: Geraint Davies
Photo: Martin Thompson
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