Album Review: Swans - "Swans" (1982)

Swans

Swans

1982

So... Well... Here's the first Swans EP. The band who is now known as an innovator in industrial, goth and post-rock music, began life here sounding very similar to its brethren in the New York no-wave scene, such as Sonic Youth and Mars (Thurston Moore was even a guitarist for our Swans at one point early in their lifespan). The main difference here is that there's a more industrial edge to it than most of them... If you want a basic description of how the whole thing sounds, imagine Sonic Youth mixed with Throbbing Gristle, and the bass turned up. Quite amusing here how Michael Gira's voice is fairly high and similar to Thurston Moore's, very much opposite to his gravelly bellows on later material.

For sure, this gives me a great picture of a desperate, strung-out, disenfranchised subculture in pre-Giuliani New York, wandering dark and dangerous streets, navigating filthy alleys, walking through dank apartment buildings looking for their next hit or client or fuck. Voices from all directions, downright evil electronics, disturbed chanted lyrics, sinister thumping basslines, sampled saxophones that make a sound like you just came up snake-eyes, and scraping metallic sheets of guitar noise. Total tension... Absolute heavy atmosphere.

Of the four tracks here, they're all quite good but I think my favorite would probably be "Sensitive Skin". It sounds like a horror film, there's no other way to describe it... Other than maybe like Slint gone evil. But beyond that, it actually anticipates the post-rock stuff the band would be doing years from this point. The rest of the EP has an almost traditional punk rock sound in places, just with some weird post-punk flourishes.

It's a shame that Michael Gira appears to have no love for this EP; outside of being appended to a 1990 reissue of their album Filth, there's no CD release of it - including on the more recent reissues of Filth, which puts some demos instead and has long replaced the 'old' reissue, making that one difficult to find. Unless it was just gossip, I also heard that Gira sold the master tapes to this album on eBay recently, presumably to fund My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. That's a lucky fan... It's weird, this EP doesn't get discussed much among fans but it's one of my favorite Swans releases. It just has a really interesting sound, and just because it's more traditional doesn't mean it's not as intense and atmospheric as any of their later stuff.

RATING: 4/5

Album Review: Big Black - "The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape" (1986)

Big Black

The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape

1986

Oh Steve Albini. You're an arrogant twat of epic proportions, your production resume is spotty, and your legions of sycophantic fans are among the worst of any band fandom I've ever dealt with, but somehow I still consider one of your records to be one of the most essential of the 80's. I am talking of course about Atomizer, though the other stuff on here isn't bad either.

What we have here is a collection of songs from Big Black, one of the best and most influential American 80's punk bands and one of the more important figureheads in the noise rock movement. This disc contains most of the first LP, Atomizer, and some EPs and miscellaneous B-sides and comp tracks. Fitting with Albini's M.O. of complaining about digital music recording and storage wherever possible, the sound quality is shit (though I can't really imagine this music having the same impact if it were polished and crisp), there's a track missing from Atomizer, and there are some smug little messages Albini added around the packaging regarding his somewhat off-base prediction about the CD format - I guess as his way of reconciling the fact that the label forced him to put this on CD in the first place.

Atomizer makes up some of the best... whatever the hell you'd most accurately call Big Black, it seems the jury is still out on that for some people... ever recorded. It's intense, angry, misanthropic, and puts you right there. Listening to "Jordan, Minnesota" or "Kerosene" or "Bad Houses" lets me vividly imagine a bored, resentful existence as a miserable slacker with a grudge against everyone, pretending for a moment I'm not already kinda close to that. They offer the very best example of Albini's violently bitter lyricism and expulsion of those thoughts, the very best example of the band's thick, hanging atmosphere of tension and demented screeching, roaring, exploding guitar tones that oftentimes make you question whether that's even a guitar you're hearing. One of my favorite things about Big Black is exemplified here - the crossover appeal. Whether your poison is industrial, grunge, indie-rock, hardcore, or whatever, you will probably find something you enjoy.

Some of the songs (especially on the Headache section) kind of droop in quality compared to the first half of the album, enough even to make me lower the score of the compilation as a whole, but they're still decent. My only complaint is that the sound quality, even on CD, is really fucking low, because Steve Albini is a huge gonad about things like that.

That said, buy this album ASAP. It deserves a place on the shelf of everyone who appreciates any of the varying routes of darker alternative music.

RATING: 4/5