Swans : "the Glowing Man"

This is the last album by this incarnation of the re-vamped Swans. It opens with a darker elegance and a get deal of sonic texture. Gira's croon is a little more refined and less like the rants of "To Be Kind". This comes a little closer to what I want from the band though I enjoyed the albums of this phase of the band, the only thing I haven't liked it the hipster hippie crowd that began to show up post- Bonnaroo thinking they were a jam band and Gira's perhaps unintentional indulgence of this. They ride the wave rather than riding the groove here, building into some punches at the end. They go into the sound of an orchestra tuning up on "Cloud of Unknowing". Twenty four minutes is asking a lot of a song. It takes the first four minutes for it to swell up into a sonic buzz. When the song begins to congeal it goes into the more droning jam we experienced on "the Seer". The vocal is more of a moaning chant, and while it creates a powerful atmosphere really forces you to consider what is or isn't a song, until the drumming begins to pound this chaos into form at the fifteen minute mark. Sonically it is really hard to argue against what they make happen here. It will prove to be more effective live than it is on this album, but then again I quit doing drugs and would have a different perspective if altered while listening to this.

Gira takes back what was stolen from him on "The World Looks Red the World Looks Black". Only fans of earlier Sonic Youth will be able to figure out what is going on in this regard and the arrangement has been drastically altered. It's slowed down and more organic. The original lyrics at still intact, but delivered in a way that makes more sense. I like the groove evolves into at the midway point. The call and response vocals only add to this. They can still play songs under ten minutes. The proof is "People Like Us" which is a sluggish dream of a crooned ballad. He voice has the baritone resonance of the the more goth like years I adore. Perhaps the lethargy of this song is ravages of age battering the inner passion Gira emotes with vocally. You are then tested with the twenty minute "Frankie M".  Feedback calls out like whale songs. It takes eight minutes before the actual song emerges for the ghostly noise. This song has been in their live rotation for some time and when you are hit with the kind of volume Swans wields live its very effective. I guess if it's  their last hurrah with this line up then it makes senses it would be committed to memory in the studio. I hope their is video of how this was captured in the studio, but it's not something I am going to listen to in the morning while walking to the gym. There is a kind of jammy quality to how the song progresses after the breakdown. It's not noodling jams, but I have seen first hand hippies respond to this in a positive manner.

They return to a more conventional song format with Gira's wife singing "When Will I Return". I like how this song builds up. It sounds like something Jarboe would have done. The title track is another mammoth 25 minute song. The intro to this more up tempo song only takes three minutes of build. Gira layers his vocals . One track of lower chanting, with his more declarative ranting style of improvised vocal sitting on top of this. Six minutes in things break back down into a simmer of ambient noise. It builds up into the kind of explosive pounding the band is known for. Their brand of heavy is a dense yet shimmering wall of sound. This ebbs back and forth until they hit a driving groove that I think I've heard them jam on before live. Gira's vocals have a touch of punk to them when he does come in. By punk here we talking about the Stooges or MC5. The bass and drums really get to shine. They more abrasive heaviness waits until the song's final three minutes to really unload on you.

The album comes to an end with "Finally Peace" which floats on the lazy flow of the melody the kind of accents post-rock bands influenced by Swans have gone on to emulate. I'll give this album a 9.5 with my only real complaint being the length of  the songs that touch the twenty minute mark, the song writing could have been more efficient  and still gotten the point across, allowing them to jam it out more live if they so choose.

The Top 100 albums of the 90s :30 to 21

30 -Darkthrone- "Total Death"

 Sure "Transylvanian Hunger" is a classic album because every black metal black born out of weather under 50 degrees imitates it, but here there are actual songs that go somewhere and not just blast beats and tremolo picked guitar for the sake of blast beats and tremolo picked guitar to drone out to.

 

 29- Madonna -"Erotica"

 Her name is Dita she will be your mistress tonight. Before Fifty Shades of Grey was a sparkle in a vampire's eye, Madonna delved into kink with this album. She even touches on trip hop before it became a thing on this album.


 

 28-Ani Difranco- "Dilate"

 While the darling of lesbians broke hearts when she married a man years later, it doesn't diminish the impact of this album that show feminist folk can rock and still have something to say. "Super-Hero" might be more popular but "Napoleon" is the best song on this one.


 

 27- Pj Harvey- "Rid of Me"

 Here is another reminder that its not about record sales as Polly Jean has sole more records, but doesn't rock as hard on or put the same malicious passion into the song. Her voice is perfect on this album, while she disappointed me going into the 2000s , I am now able to get over that and go back to listen to this again.


 


 26-The Cure- "Wish"

 This is not the Cure's best album by far, but it's their best of the 90s thought "Blood Flowers" is pretty close. It wasn't until he started messing with Korn's producer that Robert Smith started missing the mark and even then it's not that bad.

 

25- Sonic Youth - "Goo"

 Noisy indie rock , before it was called indie rock it was called punk and there is enough punk on this album to justify it , but there is also a mix of sounds that have never been captured again even by Thurston Moore.

 

 24-Ministry- "Psalm 69"

Or How to Succeed and Suck eggs if we are counting straws. Then there is this album that happened to sell well to it's demographic and help break into real industrial music tough this is more of a metal album, I wore it out at the time due to that fact.

 

 23- Emperor-"Anthems to the Welkin At Dusk"

 Yes, these guys beat out Darkthrone, while it helps them that this alum drips with King Diamond influence, its one of the best black metal albums ever made of any decade or metal albums period.

 

 22-Guns N Roses-"Use Your Illusion"

 I am counting this as a single album because did any fool buy one and not the other? There is some pretty awesome stuff on both of these that balances out the Meat Loaf like power ballads that got a little tiresome until Guns And Roses went away, then you found yourself missing even those moments. Hair metal went out on the best note possible with this one.



21-Skinny Puppy - "the Process"

Yes, I had to pick this over both "Last Rights " and "Too Dark Park" , because well the second side of "Last Rights" is just noise to do drugs to and the real songs...awesome as they are really are all in the first act. We can nit pick over "Too Dark Park" which is an amazing album as well is when it came out " the Process" sounded fresh and showed the band branch out and become actually musical.

Twilight: Beneath Tridents Tomb

Much like Cynic who we recently reviewed,  Twilight finds them self looking up at the bar they set very high for themselves, as this third album follows up 2010'a " Monument to Time End". At one time this could have been said to have been an American Black metal supergroup, this album finds many of the black metal elements stripped away for more angular sludge ones.

The reason for the shift in style is due to the line up changes that find Blake Judd gone from the fold. Judd's replacement is Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, whose addition is getting this release a fair amount of hype and from my first few listens of this album I  can say the material was written to fit Moore's style more than he is having to adapt to playing metal. To be honest the actual metal moments on this album are few and far between, it is taking me some getting used to, so lets dig into this.

The opener "Lungs" is more of a sloppy noisy ruckus that the Jesus Lizard might raise. It plods along at a much more Neanderthal like sludge pace. There is a cool feedbacked guitar melody that rings out along the perimeter of this fuzzed out pounding, but not a blast beat to be found. The metallic tinges of industrial percussion filling up the back drop sound like they are from a Neurosis album. In some ways this album reminds me of the Corrections House album that came out last year, though it is more song oriented.

"Oh Wretched Son" has its fair share of creepy dissonance. Its darker but the vocals are the most metal element going into. Wrest's gurgled rasp isn't compromised, he growls with as much agony as ever. The angular guitar sway over the chaos being drummed up around them. It is trancey at times and the first hint of a last occurs about two minutes in. The guitar tone is very different overall on this album, to accommodate Thurston.The lower more barked vocal bellows like Neurosis , and the riffs get beefier when this song builds. This song does come closer to the band's former glory than the opening track.

The album digs darker with the doomy "Swarming Funeral Mass". The industrial lite repressive elements clang up a storm on this song as well. The ominous nature of the atmosphere is much more convincing here. While its not black metal it is a reasonable facsimile of heavy. The almost funeral doom guitar melody that lingers in the background is pretty understated.

Where the band comes up against a hard place when it comes to meeting the expectations set by the previous album, is by and large the songs do not have the same flow and fury "Monument to Time End" has though it comes close to recapturing a similar feel at the onset of "Seek No Shelter Fevered Ones".  The brooding darkness seethes until the mood is ruined by the punk rock beat that it goes into instead of a blast beat. It's the very stiff snare sound that I hate about punk rock and sounds too amateurish for this band to be using.

Though in a different way than Sonic Youth, reckless noise casts an abrasive light on the bulk of this album though its most pronounced at the intro of "A Flood of Eyes". When the song actually takes off it finds its metal footing once again. Though they are not coming from the same place they have in the past. The guitars layers work in a more effective manner here to create a tapestry of dark density, that still haunts you, so we now know the band is capable of recreating what they have done they just feel the need to be hipsters around Moore. Even the blasting returns on this one which is one of the bands few black metal moments on this album.

More industrial abrasion surfaces on " Below Lights" the riff is very corrosive and angular, almost like old Swans in its jarring nature , just not as dark. It builds into a Crash Worship like clamor , but would have been left better served as an interlude than taking up space trying to pass for an actual song. It would have worked better if Moore had enmeshed himself in what this project had already perfected rather than changing to fit his playing as it had created a rather luke warm album that falls way short of the bar they already set.