Band Of Angels

Swans once was and is now again a band designed for one primary purpose: producing states of total and overwhelming joy. Despite the lyrical fixations that many perceive as overbearingly dark, violent, sexually debased and heretical, and despite the meat-headed masses that swarm to any prominent music of relative brutality and volume (and who certainly came to Swans during the first 15 years of the band’s career, from 1982-1997), the nature of the work has always been in pursuance of an elevated and elated plane. Never has this been more explicit than in Swans’ brilliant new record, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky—its first since its dissolution by Swans mastermind Michael Gira 13 years ago.

From its title on down, the album is a keenly focused re-assertion and conceptual new morning of Swans’ conquest of paradise, even as it proves something of a bridge from Gira’s last, dense period of work as the softer and more song-oriented Angels of Light. Indeed, the songs that make up My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky were initially born under the wings of the previous band. As Gira describes it, “I initially presumed it would be an Angels of Light record, but in thinking about it that way it was sort of underwhelming to me… I wanted to have something more overwhelming. For lack of a better word, louder.”

Working with the core new Swans (many same as the old Swans) Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Phil Puleo, Chris Pravdica and Thor Harris, Gira took the songs to the creative try-pots, playing one song exhaustively for several hours, and refining and recording a song a day in this manner for the bulk of the recording. The rehearsals for the band’s current tour, taking place in a sheet rock-walled room “as big as your average bedroom,” Gira describes as “grueling, very arduous, based on intense concentration… I find it very elating.”

This grand unification of repetitive, highly physical labor and the ecstatic state is the defining essence of Swans and can be traced all the way back to Gira’s young life, both working the jackhammer on construction sites and serving a nowfamous stint in Israeli prison for drug charges. And, for the so inclined, this is what makes Swans such a toweringly affecting force—in the sometimes bludgeoning, repetitive, duration-based songs, the listener (and, more effectively, the audience member) can be elevated along with the performers channeling these energies. Gira describes his intended effect of the aural tidal waves that Swans produces as “like going to church and having 10 choirs singing at once. That’s what I’m going for.”

Back in 1997, in an interview for Swans’ then-final tour, Gira stated, “I chose to end Swans now because I realize how futile it is to continue. I think the name itself has become a noose around my neck.” Thirteen years later, it seems this noose has become a rope to heaven, for Gira, Swans and those strong enough to climb with them.

-- Swans Oct. 8, Brooklyn Masonic Temple, 317 Clermont Ave. (at Lafayette Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-638-1256; 7, $TBA. Also Oct. 9 at Bowery Ballroom.