Band: Swans
Title: The Glowing Man
Year: 2016
"The glowing man" is the fourth album from Swans since the return 2009, and the 14th overall since the early 1980s. This time it's as if the band's whole discography coexist on one single disc.
All the elements of the music has with time become more protracted, more vague and abstract. The singing of Michael Gira has more and more transformed into vowel sounds and glossolalia rather than formulated texts.
The album opens with the spectacularly elusive "Cloud of Forgetting", which is a 12 minutes long intro to the 25 minutes long "Cloud of Unknowing". The musical structure alternates between rhythmic bass lines and total chaos, where Gira's primitive chanting and expressionistic, wordless vocals are surrounded and embraced by sacred choirs, roaring guitars and manic drum fills. It's very far from being a "song" in any traditional meaning, and the band would hardly have been able to start off the album in a more alienating ways. The already diehard fans will however not be disappointed by the incredible detail and depth of the introduction: the crescendo 15 minutes into the "Cloud of Unknowing" is nothing short of incredible, and the the wordless cries tear-inducing.
The title track is nearly an hour long and shape-shifts several times before it breaks all the limbs in your body with the most simple, yet relentlessly swinging combination of bass and drums I might have ever heard in the last half of the song. It's impossible to fend off. This is like hearing Bach for the very first time. Or being exposed to any great masterpiece, whatever the art form. It's an experience of the spiritual and transcendental kind.
A most fascinating and precipitous album to be simultaneously crushed and uplifted; exhausted and invigorated by. Enter at your own risk.
