Revisit other SputStaff Top 10 Lists:

Bjork | Bon Iver | Kanye West | Metallica | Mastodon | mewithoutYou

 My Chemical Romance | Queens of the Stone Age | The National | Say Anything 

Taylor Swift | Tim Hecker | Thrice

Foreword:

Equal parts the preserve of masochistic veterans of the no wave scene, po-faced crescendo-riders, and arthouse devotees of guitar music’s more arcane side, few names command the same behemoth weight or stern complexion as Swans. Founded in 1982 as the brainchild of demoniac auteur Michael Gira, the band’s output has overlapped a wide range of collaborators and musical styles, yet rarely showcased anything less than ruthless focus and a profound sensibility for the extremities of humanity and inhumanity alike.

Originally prompted by last year’s release of Swans’ sixteenth album The Beggar and subsequent discourse over whether Gira appeared to be ageing with dignity or decrepitness, this list may not plumb the depths of the band’s multi-decade career or (spoilers) even dip its toes into their harrowing noise rock roots or folk-infused middle years, but it does provide a relevant snapshot of the eras they are best known for: well over a decade since Michael Gira reformed Swans, it’s remarkable how much staying power his ’10s output has had past its initial boom. This era saw Swans reframed from a revered cult classic to an obligatory hurdle to just about anyone starting out on the path of experimental rock music, and any reservations over the expansion of their audience or the datapool underpinning our democratic process can hold their horses until you’ve heard us out as to why…

This list was voted and assembled with help from our Contributor reviewers. 

Honorable Mentions:

15. The Knot

14. The Beggar Lover (Three)

13. I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull

12. Blood Promise

11. Mind/Body/Light/Sound

Sputnik Staff’s Top 10 Swans songs:

(10) “Mother of the World”

from The Seer (2012)

The Seer was my first contact with Swans and “Lunacy” was just a brief introduction that didn’t prepare me at all for the rest of the record. “Mother of The World” kicked in with the two-note guitar thingy that sounded like a broken machine. I didn’t understand much of it back then, but it got stuck in my head and ended up listening to it over and over again. Gira’s crazy, muffled ramblings added an uncanny vibe to an already weird experience. Then, the way it just explodes into the “in and out” segment, it would haunt me for days after hearing it. The calm coda, where it turns into a more conventional piece, perfectly contrasts the rest of the tune. At first, these mesmerizing structures didn’t feel right, especially if you’re not used to this type of music, but I gradually realized how out of the box Swans really are and opened new “doors” for me to check out. Even now, after hundreds of listens, “Mother of the World” remains top 3 Michael Gira moments for me. I would use this track for everyone who wants to experience Swans in a nutshell. – Raul Stanciu

(9) “Screen Shot”

from To Be Kind (2014)

Buoyed by little pirouettes of bass ostinato and the 6/8 tap of a hi-hat and a disengaged snare, “Screen Shot” issues forth mantralike a command for the negation of all negative experience—no pain, no death, it starts. Does the repeated closing chant of “Here! Now!” act as rejoinder or confirmation to this all-encompassing No? Does the song title relate modern technologies of capture and consumption to this narrative of decay? Of nothing I feel sure except that I was eating pork tacos and “Screen Shot” made me aware of the animal. – robertsona

(8) “Volcano”

from Soundtracks for the Blind (1996)

Prominently positioned and stylistically idiosyncratic against the rest of Soundtracks, Volcano, with its feverish Bjork-esque electronica, is a dividing line for the first half of the collection. The one-room-away thumping and cosmic surrealism of the atmospherics manage to be simultaneously disquieting and catchy, with Jarboe’s honeyed tones conveying a macabre, uncompromising assessment of exploitative trends, and how giving of oneself to gain popularity and relevance is inevitably used against the individual. Contextually about the exploitative nature of fame and the puppet-masters able to take advantage of the players within it, there is a volatility to the lyrical content as it explores the idea of relevancy, and how it has the tendency to turn on those unable to forge such a path with integrity. The positioning of ‘Volcano’ serves almost as a transition slide between contrasting movements on the album, and could be seen to signal a turning point where exploitation becomes externalised; a price to be paid to overlords who determine value based on physical worth, rather than talent.

The final verse, with its flipped perspective and visceral imagery cements the disposable nature and sense of objectivity attached to the central figure of ‘Collie’, and how the currency she has been using to supplement her fame is running out. The nightmarish imagery of ‘mud filling her bridal gown’ and ‘a dress of blood and lace’ are evocative and surreal but transmit the house-of-horrors nature of fortune and the balancing act of realising potential, whilst retaining ones own value. The manner in which her talent and abilities are unceremoniously shunted into the background paints a stark picture of modern culture, with sexualisation a method of determining value. In the age of internet culture when visibility is at an all-time high and immediate fame is attainable for those willing to pay the price, the composition is perhaps more relevant and more uncomfortable than it has ever been. – PumpBoffBag

(7) “The Seer”

from The Seer (2012)

“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of all the senses.” So Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of Symbolist poetry justified his debauched and methodical self-degradation, drank down every excess, and emerged, in the end, a shell of his former self. Gira had been a poet for a long time by the time he’d worked out the Seer, as self-serious and posturing as that poetry could be, and in a band known for envelope-pushing, one great thrust into the realm of excess was what the end-times called for. The Seer numbers itself among the most gargantuan of Swans’ labyrinthian monstrosities, an endless repetition glacially metastasizing and evolving into a ragged marathon up a circuitous path into a stormcloud-shrouded mountain, where a still, small voice still whispers after the interminable crashing of thunder has spent itself, “I see it all”. Passing through the void of endlessly murmuring reeds, rattling dulcimers and wailing harmonica, where “bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions”, we arrive at last to a sinuous, diseased blues-groove and Gira’s hoarse croaking of Rimbaud’s ignominious end, maybe the hideous final resting place of all mystics who’ve gone too far, “the common mind”.

“you have arrived”

 – DadKungFu

(6) “She Loves Us”

from To Be Kind (2014)

If there’s one single descriptor I’d apply universally across Michael Gira’s assorted monuments to spit and spleen, long before we even came close to the likes of sinister, transfixing and gut-wrenching, it would surely be concerted. The man’s fixation on brimstone and horror shoot so frequently, so wilfully for territory so heavily telegraphed as unsettling that, much like an overbearing horror director, it’s often a struggle to find room for a little suspension of disbelief in this scheme. If this has been my most recurrent bugbear across the Swans discography, then the most reliable antidote to this has proved to be the sheer entertainment value of brute force and/or performative flair: as such it will come as no surprise that the carnivalesque elements of To Be Kind always sat better with me than The Seer‘s clutch towards cosmic horror.

On my life, you’ll find no finer example of Swans’ grisly, goonish excess than “She Loves Us”! The lurching build of the opening minutes sees Gira and co. titillating their audience like a malign circus troupe whipping their crowd into a slow-burning, elephant-baiting frenzy-jeer, and no introduction is needed the sheer payoff of the infamous run of vocal contortions upon which the song’s momentum eventually rests its weight. This section’s mania speaks to me as the seething malign force that lurks under everything I’ve heard from reunion-era Swans finally lashing out in naked, incomprehensible glory, and for all his absurdity, I find this cathartic, Artaudian version of Gira a good deal more refreshing and less pretentious than his more regimented clutches at the ineffable. Alternatively (from the sublime to the mundane) this song is so ridiculous that it’s no great leap of imagination to hear that YOUR NAME IS F**K refrain as a call-and-return in the company of a particularly hammy MC (take Timbaland — getyoursexyon, etc.): the boundaries of taste have been eroded and all possibilities swept off the table; all that is left is true performance; all performances are fake; real art is achieved, and so on. Whatever. “She Loves Us” is a fundamentally ridiculous song on so many levels, but let absolutely no one doubt the level of spectacle at play here. – johnnyoftheWell

(5) “Oxygen”

from To Be Kind (2014)

Perhaps the most enduring song on To Be Kind alongside Screen Shot, Oxygen is an intriguingly abstract, memorable beast. The lyrics read almost like a prayer, beseeching and desperate, with the central motif the titular life-giving element. Utilising repetitive, stuttering rhythms to backwash the lament, there are allusions to the inherent selfishness of humanity en masse, along with the effect of this behaviour against the broader picture of the environment. Touching on the idea of dependency when it comes to both ours, and the earth’s need for oxygen, the song is built upon an increasing sense of frenzy, both vocally and instrumentally, thus encapsulating the idea of breath disappearing as the song continues. There’s a sense of hopeless escalation tied into the body of the piece; an indicator that the increasing wildness will eventually have to come to a grinding halt, and this creates a potent sense of dread despite the liveliness of tone.

One of To Be Kind’s more digestible selections, but by no means any less complex in its themes, the way in which the subject matter is masterfully tied into the musicality creates a rich sense of scale, the flames of which are impressively fed by Gira’s own wailing delivery. The texture of the instrumentation itself has the structure of a chant or a sonorous rallying cry, which lends credence to the ideas of preservation- of oneself, of everything without, and the contrasting importance between the two. By the final throes, the song almost claws at its own throat in a fraught bid for survival, with a crashing finale that seems to mimic involuntary rasps (or a slowing heartbeat) and finally, a wispy rattle. It’s a dark, polished and fully-formed composition that, despite its comparative brevity and obliqueness, is positively awash with suggestion and purpose. – PumpBoffBag

(4) “Celebrity Lifestyle”

from The Great Annihilator (1995)

The noise rock current on Celebrity Lifestyle in many ways reflects the tumult and brashness of its theme; a mode of existence defined by shallow pleasures and tasteless indulgence. The visceral and stark lyrics cover a broad assortment of hedonistic values, particularly in relation to drugs, sex and their cattle-brand corruptive scarring of those unwise enough to surround the song’s central figure. Such pursuits that are frequently linked to human conceits such as love, emotion and cosmic inquisitiveness are reduced down to meaningless vices existing only for pleasure, defining the Celebrity Lifestyle as a destructive whirlwind that strips out purpose and meaning, in addition to weakening (if not outright shattering) relationships. The song’s structure, a repetitive, mildly monotone composition, completes the word painting of the titular lifestyle- thumping, crashing noise as exclamation-point shots of adrenaline in a consistent vortex of despair. Cavernous, haunting, and with a cynical sneer to Gira’s vocal performance, Celebrity Lifestyle is a scathing assessment of soulless decadence and the penalty exacted upon those pursuing it at the cost of all else. – PumpBoffBag

(3) “The Sound”

from Soundtracks for the Blind (1996)

If only “Helpless Child” didn’t exist, “The Sound” would arguably be hailed as the crowning jewel of Swans’ catalog.

It embodies so damn well the band’s ethos of delivering a paradoxical life-affirming bleakness through a monstrous track that rises again and again and again without ever really concluding. That’s an essential aspect of Swans’ (90s-onwards) soundscape, one that made Swans a favourite of us post-rock bitches: crescendos. Usually, a crescendo’s goal is to explode into gigantic moments – and this one fucking does -, but it then crashes under the weight of its self-deprecation and dials back to the overture’s keys. In the Swans Are Dead recording, that’s also when Gira howls the shit out of his self-hatred – or maybe he saw a ghostly apparition of his late mother? Either way, that stop – and that fucking scream – channels how Gira’s youthful rebellion commits suicide by its self-reflection (was there ever a more magnificently lamentable way of saying “I was wrong”?).

Yep, “The Sound” is the whole package of totalistic, noisy rock whose musical construction conveys its cryptic lyrical matter in a way that would precede – and surpass – the whole post-rock movement. – Erwann S.

(2) “The Seer Returns”

from The Seer (2012)

…and for all I’ve already written about Gira’s self-serious sermons having a thorny relationship with my suspension of disbelief, “The Seer Returns” is one instance where he got everything absolutely right. With a no-bullshit blues groove overlaid with enough uneasy shimmer to send an entire stable of ponies straight to the sandman behind him, the man could hardly ask for a more suitable street to park his soapbox — and once up there, oh baby does he know better than to overdo it. Relying less on affectation and far more on some of his most haunting lyrics delivered in a ghoulish deadpan, Gira’s back-alley sneer evokes a dour spectre of Nick Cave pleading dryly for his trademark gospel vocal arrangements to be saved from the clutches of hell (where they remain bound, in appropriately zombified form). Gira claims the golden territory of noir, exactly halfway between unknowable horror and the shape of an all-too-real character that everyone has encountered at some point, in the wrong bar, the wrong street, the wrong town at the wrong time — and from there, suddenly his vision becomes concrete and a spell is cast. Paint it as an entryist pick if you will, but there’s no smoother way in. – johnnyoftheWell

(1) “Helpless Child”

from Soundtracks for the Blind (1996)

“Helpless Child” gives me a cavalcade of death anxieties (plural). While tormented dirges are common in the Swans catalog, this song (a masterpiece) circles a zenith – or, nadir – of existential dread. I don’t mean that it sounds cartoonishly sinister or crushingly brutal. It just truly sounds like a dichotomy of dying, specifically the implications in tow: either robust, or barren; either evocative, or listless; either dignified, or pathetic. It’s a composition into which you could project the best and worst of yourself. If you’ve somehow never heard “Helpless Child”, I envy you, for you have one of those rare, unforgettable “first-listens” awaiting, still. – Jots

Listen on Spotify:

Follow us on…

Facebook
Twitter