THAT ACTUALLY HAS TO BE ALL IN CAPS…

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[5.92]

Katherine St Asaph: At first threatens slouching toward Jack White, but becomes something more shambolic and sticky, like if you sent a Conestoga wagon filled with marimbas and a hungover vaudeville troupe down a muddy hill for five minutes. You could reflect on whatever hedonism got them into this situation, or you could just look at them go.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Applaud their return — they’ve earned it (how’d they make money for years?). Scowl and nod as the Eno-esque radio dial effects at the six-minute (!) mark grace a record that debuted in the American top forty. The steady plod and crazed vocals evoke Christian Death, of all people. In short, I’ll never invite them to my home and pat myself on the back for considering it but sigh with relief at preventing a guy who uses a snake line from drinking my whiskey.
[6]

Mark Sinker: Thumpy then creaky then scrapey. I interviewed Gira once, back in the season between Jarboe arriving and MG stopping writing zine-jeremiads ALL IN CAPS: it was a phoner and the piece was like 120 words long and he was THE RANTING PROPHET OF ULTRANOISE, so I was super-anxious and reached the point of “well I think I got all I need” so soon after starting my subject was audibly taken aback. So by accident I kind of won that exchange: avant-garde noisenik abruptly reminded it’s all promo in the end, something like that. He was on the point of moving into, like, melody, which at the time was considered a mighty and a startling art move. I imagine I made a big thing of that (so I didn’t really win the exchange at all, or the reader didn’t anyway). There’s some super-pretty moments in the arrangements — and even the high-noise grind has pristine granular detail and old-school Ubu synth-blorbling — but he’s still more Jim Morrison than he’s John Lydon, you know, and we all got bored of Lydon a while ago. The snake is long. Mute nostril agony. THE SNAKE IS LONG. I mean, dude. 
[5]

Josh Langhoff: Simple groove grows progressively less simple with the addition of other elements, each intriguing, austere, and personable, interrupted by two blasts of epiphany. It adds up to a complex meditation on the inability of musical language to approach the divine but that’s the best we’ve got. Listen while driving and wake to your foot grown 10 pounds heavier.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Where did new wave become no wave? Where did a commitment to the basics of rock orthography become so abstracted to become drone and noise? When this happened, when did the experimental style stop being interesting and become severely locked-in? For someone who never understood MBV and loves Sonic Youth, these are real questions. 
[5]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: A musician I admire greatly just got back from seeing Swans play in concert over four consecutive days. I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows, uncertain if this was a regular show of devotion from fans of Michael Gira — wasn’t his band a weird industrial/goth outfit relegated to the avant-Eighties? And they could have been — I’m yet to learn from this great One Week One Band primer — but this is helping me understand their appeal a little better. It’s a crushing, amusing traipse through scenes of doom: honky-tonk saloon piano, rolling salivate vocal from Michael Gira, the roly-poly chanting, the bursts of brass-led noise and something that sounds like lasers! lasers! lasers! “Little God” isn’t only great, but it sounds like something you could easily devote yourself to.
[8]

Iain Mew: Graceful and surprisingly calm, but with a constant undercurrent that they and these riffs could break someone’s arm if they really wanted.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: Of all the bands on the outer freak fringe to be embraced by avant-indies twenty years or so too late, Swans and Current 93 remain two of the most surprising. I used to have to sell goths on those vocals, people. Gira remains as exquisitely indigestible a singer as ever, every ounce of lupine, alcoholic self-righteousness intact. Whatever he has to say about God and Our Hands he’s long ago said over and over and over again but the music is an exquisite gamelan fistfuck with some seriously demented high harmonics. And if you think those Zorn-like blares that overwhelm all the grind are pure noise, I suggest you listen again. There are whole worlds in there.
[8]

Megan Harrington: To believe the story told by Swans critical reception (out of 29 professional reviews of To Be Kind, only one was written by a woman — Anna Wilson for Clash Magazine) is to believe that Swans are so full of testosterone, so sneering and dismissive that their band/fan relationship is one that can only be shared between father and son. Women simply won’t (or don’t know how to) indulge long, masturbatory, industrial jam albums. It’s also to believe wholeheartedly that Michael Gira is a genius beyond reproach. That he’s not, after nearly four decades of honing this particular style of music, simply sticking the right plug in the right socket and tuning out. Gira’s not my God. When I listen to Swans I don’t hear the whirr and spin of the slot machine, just an old man cashing in his chips. 
[3]

Brad Shoup: Totally pop music, even if the feedback lasers are practically begging to turn into some G-funk whine. There’s a bit of Waits and Weill in the clomping track: a little sideshow goonery. It’s especially there when they strike up a funky chant, something to distract from the unending guitar ostinatos. I dunno if the laser show at the end is, like, earned, but it’s certainly welcome.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: I doubt I’ve heard a new record by Swans since 1989’s The Burning World (of which I’m a huge fan), and this is most certainly not that band, even if Michael Gira’s still running things. Give him credit for this: this is definitely, defiantly experimental rock, very clearly influenced by the glory days of Krautrock, with a touch of Steve Reich in its drone-iness, and a sprinkling of Sonic Youth (especially when it goes into feedback-o-rama at its end). This isn’t particularly my cup of tea, but it’s good for what it is.
[6]

Crystal Leww: Gosh, for experimental rock music, this is awfully same-y, huh?
[3]