DISCO DI TEMPO FA, LA RECENSIONE DI PITCHFORKMEDIA , 8,2 SU 10 IN EFFETTI E’ UN GRAN DISCO

Swans
Not Here/Not Now
Young God; 2013
By Stuart Berman; November 8, 2013
8.2
ARTISTS:
Swans

Contrary to popular belief, Swans are not a noisy band. Noise is a dissonant irritant, something that makes you wince momentarily and prompts you to plug your fingers in your ears as a defence mechanism. However, a Swans concert presents a symphony of cacophony from which even deafness provides no relief. Because Swans deal not in noise, but loudness—a gusty, wall-crumbling, tectonic-plate-shifting loudness that doesn’t so much give you a headache as an ulcer. As I discovered during a show last fall, even when you’re taking a mid-show piss in a bathroom that’s two storeys and several walls removed from the venue stage, Swans are still the most punishing band you’ve ever experienced.
But for all the abuse and misanthropy they project in concert, Swans consistently reward their fans’ tolerance with great acts of generosity. Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album that Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010, and like the previous concert document—2012’s We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head—it’s a limited-edition, hand-crafted package that will help fund the next Swans studio opus. (And given that we got The Seer out of the last deal, it’s no surprise that Not Here/Not Now’s first run sold out almost immediately. Though you can still donate to the cause by ponying up $500 for something even better than a mere record: a new Gira song written in your honour.) But Swans live albums have come to represent more than just fancy souvenirs for charitable fans. They’re opportunities for Swans enthusiasts to observe the band’s ever-evolving aesthetic in action: Of the songs featured on Not Here/Not Now, only three have appeared on previous recordings. And any worries that Swans are showing too much of their hand are defused by the fact that new Swans songs rarely make it from the stage to record in the same form, and, once officially released, mutate even further in subsequent performances.
So if you’re wondering if you need another version of “The Seer”, the answer is: hell yes. After debuting as a brawny, pulsating rocker on We Rose and then transforming into the exotic, cinematically rendered 32-minute centerpiece of its 2012 namesake album, “The Seer” reappears on Not Here/Not Now as an oozing piece of toxic sludge that just gets thicker and nastier over its marathon 44-minute runtime, with two new songs bubbling up from its miasma: the scorched-earth psychedelia of “Bring the Sun” and “Toussaint L’ouverture”, a maniacal Francophone rant couched in an opium-den ambiance reminiscent of the comedown on Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr. Skull”. But even those developments feel natural compared to what’s happened to “Oxygen”, a song that first surfaced as an acoustic meditation on Gira’s 2010 solo album I Am Not Insane, but has been unrecognizably reworked into a gut-punching, Jesus Lizardian rumble. (The original describes Gira’s experience with asthma; the new version feels like it.)
You can get a pretty good idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album from the lone 80s-era track that figures here: the Holy Money-era sludgefeast “Coward” is the perfect complement to the bone-crushing heft of new 10-minute dirge “Just a Little Boy”, which sounds even more like how you’d imagine a Melvins cover of David Bowie’s “Station to Station” would sound than the Melvins’ actual cover of “Station to Station”. And that’s just the third-longest new song unveiled here: the stormy 16-minute opener “To Be Kind” sees Gira gravely repeating the title with the solemn cadence of a cantor, as if the sentiment expressed within was an impossible ideal; “She Loves Us!” deviously appropriates the title of a bygone Beatles hit in service of a 15-minute maelstrom that builds up a drum-battered drone into a mutant stoner-metal groove.
By comparison, the sand-swept drift of “Nathalie Neal” can’t help but feel like the least momentous of the new-album previews on offer here, but it serves as a logical bridge out of these caustic concert recordings into Not Here/Not Now’s pair of lo-fi acoustic-demo denouements. More than just expose the psych-folk underpinning of Swans’ seismic sound, the rough sketches for “Kirsten Supine” and “Screen Shot” offer a disarmingly intimate glimpse into Gira’s songwriting process, complete with his play-by-play, strum-by-strum commentary. After nearly two hours of being subjected to Swans’ highly orchestrated onstage onslaught, these human, off-the-cuff moments come as a great relief; in sharp contrast to the authoritative, stentorian presence Gira casts in concert, the demos present him in charmingly self-deprecating mode, questioning himself about what direction he should steer the song into, or even if it’s any good to begin with. Just as the double-tracked vocal incantations and needling acoustic jabs of “Screen Shot” approach peak hypnotic intensity, Gira stops the song cold and admits, “I have no idea where it’s going to go from there… but we’re going into the studio in a couple of weeks and we’ll figure it out.” Given Swans’ recent track record, those words feel less like glib reassurance than a distant early warning of what’s to come.