As Halloween edges ever so closer to us,
To Be Kind will reenter playlists. There's no question about it. The abstraction presented within this album is close to pure sonic horror. But don't believe horror was the sole intention with this record. Although there's no way to be exactly sure how Gira and company throw their compositions together, there are some general conclusions one can reach. The listener's best approach may be to look at it this way. Swans takes a short, punchy rock tune, throws the song into a blender until pureed, lets it sit and watches it separate for days to weeks, and spreads it out further than ever thought possible. It's here where the true realization of post-rock is achieved: not just with the crescendo of guitar passages, but with a complete breakdown of the rock aesthetic into something that sounds more haphazard than rehearsed.
This isn't to say that being unsystematic when recording is a flaw. It makes the album. In fact, it makes it catchy - something that it shouldn't be. But when you give the album time, you see how this could happen. The lyrics are rudimentary. When viewed from the surface they look immature, nearly asinine, as Gira sounds more like a child throwing a tantrum than an experienced musician. And there's the charm. You don't have to enter some deep thought process of trying to figure out exactly what Swans is trying to say. Instead, their compositions infiltrate your subconscious as they grasp onto the very feeling of what it means to be human. The bipolarity of all of us is explored by this album, making the listener perceive (for example, love and hate at the exact same time). This abstract approach makes an immediate and direct connection with their audience, which at times seems closer to hypnosis than lecture.
Niklas Kvarforth says on "I och med insikt skall du förgå", the opener to the album IV: The Eerie Cold by Shining, that "In reality, humanity is horror." The members of Swans would agree with him. The instrumentals presented here bend the mind into a pretzel as they pummel the listener like someone on the street in the fetal position being mugged by a coterie. They're not overly technical and they're surely not entirely original in form. However, they combine in such a way that builds, and builds, and still keeps building until the listener feels the horror the band seems to know all so well. And when you combine this with Gira's absolutely demented delivery, you find yourself and where you stand. Swans has created the best album of the year by showing all of us how wicked we truly are. If only we weren't so unaware of it.
