After taking a break from the project and recording and touring as Angels of Light, Michael Gira’s Swans are back in full force. The group reassembled around 2010 after more than a decade hiatus and has steadily gained higher and higher praise with each release. The group uses repetitive, swelling, progressively expansive arrangements to create dark, hypnotic rock. Songs sprawl out, ending somewhere between a few minutes later and half an hour later. Lyrically, the songs can be dark, intense and emotionally raw.
The band is a six-piece utilizing guitars, bass, slide, keys, trombone and percussion, the latter of which is held down by two people–a full time drummer and another percussionist on a variety of instruments. That multi-instrumentalist is Thor Harris, formerly of Shearwater, and member of a number of other bands in Austin including Nazi Gold. Harris played not only percussive instruments and trombone, but also several homemade instruments of his own making, including a stringed instrument. Harris is known for his prowess in constructing unique, hand crafted instruments. Together, the band generated an impressively loud and transfixing set of relentless sound.
It took a few songs before Gira addressed the sold out Mohawk crowd on Friday, and when he did it came simply in the form of purposefully unintelligible mumbling as he rolled his wrists and shook his hands, as if to say, Hi and thanks and all that stuff that people say. The audience laughed, and the gesture didn’t come across as rude or ungrateful. Rather, it seemed that Gira knows why he performs music, why he makes art. He’s onstage to deliver punishing rock and not to banter with the audience. Anyone in attendance is here because they share an appreciation for the realities of our own humanity, our own psychologies, our own emotional depths. Those are dark places that can simultaneously be transcendently beautiful. And that’s what Swans captures so dutifully.
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