SWANS - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

The legend of Michael Gira’s SWANS is one of deafening underground heroism. In the New Yorkers' earliest incarnation, their soul-shakingly loud live shows brought them a certain degree of notoriety, and while Gira moved from that barrage of noise through to more carefully orchestrated expermentalism - eventually abandoning the SWANS moniker in favour of the perhaps more personal Angels of Light - it is that earliest roar of unbridled intensity for which he, and they, are best remembered.

With SWANS now reimagined and revived to facilitate Gira’s next step forward across the musical landscape, the transplanted Californian has sidestepped the nostalgia circuit favoured by so many of his contemporaries to actually base his seminal band's return on an album of entirely new material. That album, My Father.., is a vast, swirling miasma of avant-noise, announcing in no uncertain terms that this is one comeback that ought to be taken very seriously. Edging in with the drone hypnotics and squalling guitar of ‘No Words/No Thoughts’, it never - musically or thematically - lets up until the sign-off note of the delicate, disturbing ‘Little Mouth’.

While there are sidesteps into funereal dissonance, such as on third track ‘Jim’, Birthday Party-esque lurches into warped big band sounds on ‘My Birth’, and even a duet between Gira’s daughter and Devendra Banhart on the haunting, uncomfortable ‘You Fucking People Make Me Sick’, the strength of conviction never wavers throughout.

Obsessed with the claustrophobic, the iconographic and - above all else - the terror of existence itself, this is a record that uses the tropes of industrial music, feeds them through a mesh of modern European composition, and spews forth a heartsick, epic meditation on religion and personality. The key lyric here is found on the almost catchy ‘Reeling The Liars In’, as Gira punctuates the heavy, tense atmospherics with the beautiful, crushing, masochistic couplet "Here is my hand / Now drive the nail in".

With SWANS here sounding every bit as ‘heavy’ as they did in their violent late-'80s/early-'90s heyday - and a good deal more sophisticated to boot - My Father... is a more than adequate return from an artist of rare intention and intellect. Oh, and it’s pretty fucking loud too.