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Swans are the Game of Thrones of bands: epic in scale, tonally intense, and if you told me any of the members had once crushed a man's skull with their bare hands, I wouldn't question it. At the Roseland Theater on Sept. 6, each song unfurled with a season's worth of stomach-knotting dread, and most at about half the length of a typical GoT episode. (And even better: no stupid dragons were involved.) Michael Gira, for decades the group's mastermind, played maestro, conducting the band through its shudderingly loud post-rock dirges, occasionally holding his arms aloft and wriggling like an electrocuted monkey. Swans practices a massive kind of minimalism, often repeating a single motif ad nauseum, but as much of an endurance test as it can be, the band never merely bludgeons or suffocates. The compositions expand and contract, from a whisper to a roar and back again, and if you let the waves of volume wash over you, the music eventually becomes transcendent, even resplendent in its beauty. At the end of its two hour set, the members stood in a line at the front of the stage, smiling and bowing, even venturing into the audience to dole out high-fives and commiserate with the audience. Maybe these dudes aren't murderous cannibals after all. Or maybe that's precisely what they want you to think. MATTHEW SINGER.
Swans (photos by Kevin Meyer):
Carla Bozulich (photos by Natalie Behring):
WWeek 2015