why? why? why on earth would i be being sarcastic about thinking holy money (a screw) is the best swans song?

you always think im "trolling" whatever that means over the most bizarre shit.

Sorry, instrumentation wise I thought that was a terrible Swans song, indeed, its from the era of Swans I don't really dig, so I though you were fucking with us ;)

Again, when I use the word "trolling" I imply being purposefully incendiary without any intentions of a serious two-way dialogue. That is why I accused !@#$%! of trolling about Nero and Rome, he was just throwing that out there to spark another kind of fire, he didn't intent to have an actual discussion about the historicity of his claim about Christians starting the fire, which most historians, past and present, have rejected as questionable. He just wanted to either get a rowel out of somebody or get an empty high five from somebody else, we got a term for that its called, "preaching to the choir to get an amen." There is no intentions of an open discussion, just needless polemics.

Just be less obvious and more like this poster from another forum. Who, obviously, got there before you did.

''It's possible to work a fairly normal 40-hour work week in NYC, but your job will probably be very stressful -- or, if you're working for yourself, you will be whoring (or "hustling," if you're a dumbass or sociopath and want to glorify your cheap existence) yourself and your product at all fucking hours. I've done the former; am incapable of the latter. Neither seem like a viable option to me. Both are repulsive. The latter is repugnant.

I had a flirtatious exchange with some dumb ditch at a bar about a year ago. Manhattan-born. I asked her what her opinion was of someone like me: someone who moved here with no real trajectory; just curiosity and boredom. I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like, "Well, if you're not here for a reason, you need to get the fuck out of the way." Yeah. Real cute party line she adopted from whomever. Wonder how she feels about all the illegal immigrants who essentially run the restaurants. Or all the interns or underpaid peons who leverage the shit-work for entertainment and media. There's no room for actual humanity here.

David Byrne writing about life in NYC is a joke. He's a joke. I don't need his opinion. His take on the money bubble in NYC is -- to paraphrase once more -- something like, "Well, this obsession with money has led otherwise creative people to choose a career in trading or real estate." Well, my take is that if you're that interested in money, I could give a shit about what you chose. If I could choose for these people, I'd place them in a gulag and encourage them to decimate one another. Even if they did pursue art or any sort, I would suss them out and write them off from the word "go." Furthermore, I don't think most people I know and respect who create this/that/other had a choice at all. They were maligned and had to make something. Wall Street was never an option. For me, personally, I could not even conceive what that kind of life entails, and even if I were intensely interested in becoming rich, I would have no idea how to do it and am not unscrupulous and sociopathic enough to make it a reality.

I don't care how jaded, ignorant or childish this sounds: I can't wait for the real freaks to take music back from the squares. I can't wait for these middling media outlets like Vice, Brooklyn Vegan, etc. to die a slow, agonizing death. If I were smart, I'd find a way to exploit them for money. But I'm not smart. I'm angry.

''NYC's only saving graces are museums and attractive women. I've seen all the former. The latter are typically stupid. I'm not really interested in a meat-mitten at this point, but if I were: what a grand ol' time.''

hey you fucking fat piece of shit, i told you not to talk to me. if you want to go down that road prepare to get chewed the fuck out you fat fuck

Probably someone told me that already. Years ago.

all your past friends and lovers.

Don't be jealous because someone is better at being angry than you are and they can articulate it better.

i told you not to talk to me flubbula

Knock Knock!

knock knock, its the metropolitan police, stop harassing young men on the internet please sir! ok, can you drive me to dunkin donuts?

lol!!

so how much do you guys hate me if i tell you this is my fav Swans album?

I like the new album a lot,much prefer it to the Seer which is my least favourite by them by a long way, to me it sounded like a well executed sell out. Really enjoy the second disc on the new one.

Still My Father is the best post-reformation Swans album in my opinion.

What are people's thoughts on Burning World? I know it gets lots of hate which I never really understood, it has some beautiful tracks
on.

Burning World is definitely one of my favorites. Don't care what Gira says.

Wait....so after that rant you declare you haven't even HEARD To Be Kind yet?

Haha. I needlessly replied before reading on.

exactly babe, right onnnnn.

I understand it's pretty fucking disgraceful on my part, but is it really so wrong to not wish to be associated with a band subjected to people who apathetically jump onto these groups and then in essence bastardise them? to see swans as a 'scary' but 'redemptive' group is so fucking absurd, they're just a band who make noise. I can dissociate gira and his bullshit doomy persona from the group, but when fans (loose term) proliferate this and hold it as an inextricable, if not fundamental element of the music then any quality it had to me is rendered wholly null and void.

http://www.stereogum.com/1679622/pre...re-evaluation/

read this. just fucking read it and tell me you're not entirely repulsed. shit journalism sucked out of this incestuous system's mama arsehole, and then regurgitated by their nigh-on vegetative readership. "AOTY". "AOT fucking Y". what does that even mean? this music is digested not because of its innately pleasurable purpose but rather so as to fit into a wholly arbitrary ordering system which means nothing.

I just hate people, and therefore want to ignore swans because those whom they previously derided are now their primary target audience. as pad said, they sold out. and ordinarily I don't care, but it's as if they're embracing this totally one-dimensional view of their music as 'scary' and 'dark', and indeed seem to be playing it up so as to fully capitalise on this fleeting interest in them.

new swans are sick, yes, but have any of the records they've made been as good as holy money? no. soundtracks for the blind? no. kill the child? no.

i dont think your post makes a lot of sense.

the journalism is not the bands fault. neither are the fans. music journalism is nonsense and i havent read it in years.

mark fisher could write about music, timothy morton can. apart from those guys, ive maybe skimmed a handful of other reviews in the past 5 years or so. its all bs.

its just hype and nonsense. it attempts to draw it into some sort of individual narrative, or it just says things that don't mean anything.

when you read those reviews, they're just like a little buzz of anticipatory hype to get you excited until you click play. that's all they really are. garbled bullshit most of the time.

music journalism lost the plot ages ago when the communal aspect of culture was lost to individualism. 99% of writers can't draw the music into any greater contexts than their own narcissistic yammerings.

of course, if they try to, they get immediately viciously attacked by the legion of "ITS JUST MUSIC MAN! JUST ENJOY IT AND SHUT UP!" people.

i actually dont think that review you linked to is all that bad.

most reviews now seem to be very self conscious and desperate to try and affect this particular poise in which the music is understood to not really mean anything and not be like deep or something which is incredibly incredibly threatening for the post modern consumer who wants his slop to be shorn of any wider context and just satiate his own solipsistic incoherent demands.

most of what is said about music online is just people showing off. something is not cool (because others believe it is and that's not cool) or something is great. either time, it's just the ego of the person that's really talking.

i still don't see how this is the musics fault though. also, bands have to play these games because they cant afford to live or make their music anymore.

I might be one of the people that guest hates, because I only jumped onto Swans bandwagon a year after The Seer was released. Then I indulged in My Father..., and now I am engrossed in TBK. I know NOTHING of pre2010 Swans (although I will get Soundtracks one day I'm sure.) But none of this changes the fact that TBK and Seer are monumental achievements, even if they are very different from those early records.

guest, you're making it more than it is. (a) Swans is not a cult, its a band, they release records, they hope people will listen and/or buy them; (b) just because people "bandwagon" onto a band doesn't make them fake, or make their opinions less valid, after all, attracting new listeners and a new audience is kind of why bands put out records in the first place, after all, how did you discover them exactly? Some kind of metaphysical revelation from above? Did Gira personally send you a private copy and explicitly ask you not to share his band with anyone else? In other words, chill out!

guest will really hate me when I say I LOVED reading that review about a week ago. I think it is the best written review on TBK I've seen.

I came to Sonic Youth in 1988. Just want to throw that out there. :eek:

Suchfriends, you're speaking much sense. Some people jus need to chill out, listen to the album and (most importantly) make their own opinions.

i can see where guest is coming from, he's an old fan who doesn't like how Swans are suddenly getting popular among the tumblr generation.

i'm with you though, i wouldn't recommend anyone to be so concerned about what other people listen to and their motives.

apologies for all this, was drunk when I wrote the first one and monumentally hung over for the second so both the logic and the fundamental point itself are pretty fucking absurd.

as for the stereogum article, it wasn't the review itself but rather the comments section. they're symptomatic of what the problem is, not you skuj. you've obviously expressed a willingness to explore beyond their recent output. I'll give you an example: I had a bunch of friends who "loved" the new swans stuff because it was I shit you not "dark" and "rad" because of said darkness, so I put on some fushitsusha and they all fucking recoiled. I understand that the latter are more abrasive than swans, and not so much cartoonishly dark (as swans are) as they are molasses black to the core, but on a basic level they are both hellish noise rock, that's it. and yet these people for some reason totally unknown to me can't resonate with this music on any level whatsoever, as a result of which I am totally bemused.

it's not that they have a widening fanbase which is of concern to me, hell I wasn't even born when swans were in their original run so who the fuck am I to comment? instead what I'm saying is this newfound group appreciate the music on an incredibly superficial level, and I guess it's the age-old feud between 'music fan' and 'music lover', given that this is an art form which I for better or worse take deadly seriously. popularity is never, EVER an issue, but to have people latching on (perhaps merely momentarily) who are only fleetingly interested in the group irrevocably undermines the band for me, something which is my fault entirely but still an indubitable fact from my own perspective.

that gira seems to be pandering to this is understandable, yeah, but it's disappointing from someone who has seemed so steadfastly committed to his own idiosyncratic vision from the outset of his career. early swans didn't feel like a child's nightmare from fucking nickolodeon (which the last two records do, not so much my father) and that it is so theatrical does make me dislike it a bit considering how disconcertingly (and genuinely) intense something like filth or holy money was.

in the interests of full disclosure I am again drunk.

Hmmm. On one hand you really make me want to get those earlier Swans records. (I'm a Noisehead in general.) But Man, just because Gira has moved his style towards "songs" and groove, doesn't mean he is selling out or pandering, imho. TBK and Seer sound very steadfastly committed to a vision, which happens to come from a 60yr old vice a 30yr old. Do you want him to repeat himself? I don't hear cartoonish/nickelodeon when I hear these motherfuckers, but to each their own I suppose. (I have some issues with My Father which seem opposite to your concerns - I see My father as a tentative warmup towards the next two releases. It comes across as very restrained imho.)

my disc/live DVD was waiting for me at the house in the mailbox when I got home from work today. I am SOOOOOO fucking looking forward to sitting down with some brews and "watching" the DVD..

Saw the tracklist for the dvd, it's nearly a 2hr show. Fuck me, what a collection.

That is why I bought it, it was just $2 more, it was a no brainer. It was really the only reason I bought the CD version, the digital download was 13.98, the CD was 16.98 and the special edition with the DVD was 18.99.. It was like DUH!!!

Fuck it. Ordering this right fuckin now. My record store won't stock this special edition.

I would have bought the DVD by itself for $20, I look at it as the CD being free ;)

Also I'm glad I could help persuade you, you won't regret it in the least

much like The Seer I find myself gravitating more around the second disc than the first, though not enough to say one is necessarily better than another. On my ipod right now I only have disc two of The Seer, and its sounding like I will be stuck on disc 2 of To Be Kind in a similar way for the next foreseeable future

money is flesh in your hands

As great as the new batch of Swans material might be, nothing to me will compare to Children of God. Whether he will admit it or not, Gira's ego has definitely grown from all the P4K hype. Early Swans records were completely unpretentious and honest in their hatred. Plus I miss Jarboe. Perfect foil.

That is thing, these past two records don't seem to have any touch of loathing or hatred, the are almost optimistic, albeit in a Swans kind of way ;)

I'm watching the DVD tonight, didn't get a chance last night. This fucking song Kirsten Supine, especially when coming out of that beautiful mess of sound and feedback that was the ending minutes of She Loves Us.... shit. THAT alone has swallowed up my weekend.. I haven't felt this way about a particular riff since Shannon Wright "Commoner's Saint" or wait, I think this song came out more recently by her and affected me in a similar way.. Tax the Patients

it's not the shift in sound which has caused me to become slightly more dubious about new swans, but rather that he has really become consumed by a persona, which is so distinctly at odds with that brutally honest feeling which was central to early swans up to the burning world. those records feel like fucking exorcisms, akin to something like jandek or haino et al in that you're disconcerted by the fact that you're essentially listening in on the purging of a tormented individual's misery. there was no artifice to that, it was pure expression. and in that, it's not that I don't want him to repeat itself, more so that I don't feel post-children of god to be the same band, with that record itself to perhaps be the mid-point between the two disparate sounds. of course that isn't to say I dislike what came after, I mean die tur ist zu, soundtracks and swans are dead make up some of my favourite material of theirs. but it becomes more of the 'gira/jarboe' show at that point, it's so far apart from the early stuff. you're in for a fucking treat, but you'll see what I'm talking about there. as far as I'm concerned this is all a lot closer to angels of light, which I'm fine with, but it's not what got me into swans.

yeah but if I wanted that (which I don't and never will), I'd listen to like fucking godspeed or explosions in the sky or shania twain or some shit. I don't want that euphoric trash from swans, I want aural rape. swans always seemed so ideologically opposed to that, indeed they were like the total opposite, like audible nihilism, an immutable loathing of mankind.

Eh. Children Of God was such an inconsistent album. It does have one of the best 'track 1, side 1' songs ever though.

The title track was the first Swans song I liked (their first album I listened to was Filth, and this back when I considered Dinosaur Jr to be weird so good god I couldn't handle that shit). There's something so inspiring about the song Children of God though. That whole album has such an unforced "spiritual" quality to it that still blows my mind. The newer stuff, while great, I think is a bit more planned out and loses some of the brute nihilism as a result.