SWANS are DEF

I actually asserted this observation on Facebook earlier in the week, so apologies if it's old news to you already.

I picked up a slew of new releases in the last couple of weeks, and have been itching to post a sort of rundown, but haven't had the time, as yet. But the one album I've been pretty much living inside since purchasing is the sprawling new opus from SWANS, that being The Seer.

It's certainly the first album by Michael Gira and company in a long, long time to have garnered so much press. I started following the band back in the early 90s, and for most of that period, their music was met with contempt, confusion and indifference. No less weighty and sensory-engulfing than their previous efforts, The Seer -- the band's second post-resumption effort -- landed like a bowling ball in a placid swimming pool earlier this summer, and Gira's sterny visage (beneath his signature cowboy hat) is suddenly everywhere. Tickets go on sale today for their New York dates in October, and I dare say, they're going fast (if not already sold out). Seemingly after decades in exile from coolsville, SWANS are actually hip.

In any case, The Seer still isn't for everyone. My estimable comrade Phil Freeman took the album to task recently in Burning Ambulance for being ... well ... rife with virtually every other grievance previously leveled at the SWANS catalog. In a way, he's absolutely right. To paraphrase Michael Gira himself, The Seer is sonically the culmination of the band's thirty-someodd years. To my ears, though, that's why its acclaim is so remarkable. SWANS didn't move the mountain. The mountain -- finally -- came to SWANS.

Anyway, purple prose notwithstanding, there have been a few aspects of the album that I've wanted to discuss, and this next one if foremost among them. While it's an allusion that would probably make Michael Gira choke up a hairball, when the rhythm kicks into the album's fifth track, "The Seer Returns" (far and away my favorite moment on the album) at approximately 0:42, my ears cannot help but hear a classic track by another revered squad of Lower East Side alumni..... notably "So Whatcha Want" by ye olde Beastie Boys. Hear for yourselves....

I smell a mash-up!

It's actually not that far out a comparison. Gira's flock actually rubbed elbows with the fledgling Beasties on a an amazing (and now amazingly rare) live compilation from the early 80's called Speed Trials (find out more here). While the hardcore-era Beasite Boys were running amok on Avenue A, Gira and Jarboe were one block over on Avenue B, their stay immortalized on The Seer by a frankly discordant and harrowing instrumental dubbed "93 Avenue B Blues."

Anyway, it was just an observation.