The Pen Is Mightier

And here's your second review of the day, this time of a very famous international act  also worth listening to, but I suspect you know this already.

SWANS – THE BEGGAR (Mute) 

People used to say “Swans can break a man’s ear with just one beat of a drum”. At their inception, Michael Gira’s band of less-than-merry men were known for their sonic brutality, especially live, where many an exciting new career as a tinnitus-sufferer began. The addition of singer/keyboardist Jarboe heralded a new melodic sensibility, but the underlying aggression remained, a misanthropic sonic gall hidden below the sweetly tuneful surface. When the band reformed in 2010, after 13 years of silence, their sound was a little different, more spacious and subtle. A Swans album was still intense, but it was more often the intensity of a cold unwavering stare than of a spittle-flecked harangue. The Beggar, their sixteenth studio album, makes good use of the quietly ardent tone, and whilst listening is intentionally oppressive, it’s like the insidious continual whisper of conscience rather than the brimstone sermon, and even when songs reach a clangourous attack they tend to build frog-boilingly slowly from hushed beginnings. 

This is the case form the very outset, 'The Parasite' opening with 6 chilly, spare guitar notes which sound like the start of Ennio Morricone’s theme to a new Dollars film set in purgatory, before building to a stentorian drone to leave us eight and a half minutes later trapped in a church organ with some wasps - and if you think eight and a half minutes is exhaustingly long for a track, then strap in! 'Michael Is Done' begins with barely voiced moth-wing string flutters and an oddly sprightly nursery rhyme melody before swelling slowly towards the sudden eruption of a Spector wall of sound, complete with rattled tambourine and girl-band backing vocals (incidentally, the Michael in question might be the apocalyptically battling archangel, rather than the lyricist, but regardless, “He’s the hate in the love […] his words are burnt meat” seems to sum up the Gira aesthetic). Even when tracks start off imposing, they tend to get even bigger and darker. Take the title track, which grows from a sinister bass groove to relentless slave-galley drums, but 'Ebbing' takes the bombastic biscuit and, despite its name, swells and waxes a folky little vocal melody to a crushing crescendo: this is the soundtrack to a short alternative version of The Wicker Man where the locals just decide to sacrifice themselves and the entire island ends up in flames.  

Essentially, The Beggar has two flavours, gliding between sweet and sour, heavenly and harrowing, or – to borrow from first two tracks’ titles – paradise and parasite. Variations of these  are mixed and swirled on the confusingly named 'The Beggar Lover (Three)' for a shade under 44 minutes. Such is the density of this fascinating collage that it would take an entire review of its own to cover, but in lieu of a map, here is a list of notable landmarks: a paranoid miasma of strings, like a particularly fretful Ligeti; sinisterly sepulchral tubular bells; a smooth voice-over actor intoning lines like “Its appetite is endless and will never be filled”, as if on a 1990s guide to setting up your expensive stereo in hell; a percussive flurry, like summer rain heard from inside a cello; a lead-footed industrial rhythm paired with luxuriant siren vocals; disconnected robot phonemes strangely reminiscent of Jean-Michael Jarre’s Zoolook; sub-aquatic trip-hop; a timpani duel; a kid singing playground classic 'This Old Man' and totally fucking it up.  

For all their power, sometimes Swans’ portentous bleakness can become a bit, you know, silly. It’s hard not to giggle when a zombie-Cohen croak repeats “come to me, feed on me” for 45 seconds straight. There are also times, such as the 60s garage chug of 'Los Angeles: City Of Death', or the stately chord progression and gospeloid choir of 'No More Of This', that edge towards a safe rock stodge, like Spiritualized’s blackened goth cousins. Some might wish for more of the pounding drums and hellish vocals of old, others might hope for more of the experimental blasted patchwork of 'The Beggar Lover (Three)', but the album succeeds best through its unwieldy, unmanageable length. They say Swans can break a man’s spirit with just two hours of unstinting grimness. 

Is Slang?

I've just submitted my latest MusicOMH review, which starts off talking about hip-hop before reviewing John Cale. This one spends more time talking about hard bop than one might expect for a techno review. I can't really defend these choices.

TERENCE FIXMER – SHIFTING SIGNALS (Mute)

Most vintage jazz albums had liner notes, and most of these liner notes consisted of streams of dated slang terms. Pick up your favourite Blue Note or Prestige classic, and although the music might now be celebrated as some of the best of the mid-twentieth century, the sleeve is liable to sound like an awkward aging uncle, exclaiming, “Hey, even on a relaxed blowing session, this cat is cookin’. They don’t just have chops, they have soul. Check out the spicy licks as the trumpet and drums trade four-bar passages”. The music has aged far better than its context, the one still feeling fresh and relevant, the other quaint and archaic. We’re witnessing a similar change in attitudes regarding techno. If Terence Fixmer’s seventh album had been released as little as twenty years ago, you could expect press releases banging on about a dispassionately anonymous producer wielding unfeeling technology. This earlier era of electronica may not have seen the full Nat Hentoff approach - “Hey, even on a white label remix, this faceless producer is facelessly producin’. They don’t just have all the manuals for their devices, they have an utterly robotic absence of humanity. Check out the ineluctable, emotionless high-pass filter as the synthesiser and drum machines repeat the same four bars for twelve minutes.” – but it was certainly bigger on cyborgs and fractals.

It’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can listen to a strong album like Shifting Signals for its musical qualities, rather than as a sci-fi signifier. This is doubtless partly because computers are now something we carry in our pockets, rather than the domain of tech-wizards , and the idea of a dance producer connecting and sequencing actual hardware seems as charmingly whimsical as a skiffle band with a tea-chest bass, but also because a near forty-year-old genre which has so clearly influenced the mainstream no longer sends shocks (regardless of how much the guitarist at your local pub’s Sunday jam session witters on about proper musicians being threatened by this new-fangled stuff). Shifting Signals makes clear nods towards specific moments in techno’s history, such as the mournful Aphex horns hovering behind a rubbery loop on Reset, the almost funky bounce and muffled vocals of The Way I See You which recall Baby Ford’s terribly under-rated BFORD9 album, and the minimal Jeff Mills march of Automaton (OK, there are still the odd nods to robo-chic in techno’s DNA, that could have been a Model 500 title from 1985). 

Although there are moments of sonic sleekness on display, such as the shiny burnished hum of The Passage, the album is at its best with grimy textures and Fixmer proves himself to be a master at marshalling dirty industrial sounds. Corne De Brume – or Foghorn, in English – opens with a wavering static buzz resembling a detuned telly being spun on a rotary washing line, and is topped by some rusty distorted notes. They could cleaned up and airlifted into a different track as euphoric ravey airhorn blasts, but here they sound as if there was a loose connection in the studio, adding a rough glitchy texture. Roar Machines is built on a similarly scuzzy baritone synth line, which is tweaked and twisted throughout. It almost sounds as though it was based on speech patterns...though if you hear actual words, maybe it’s time to remove the headphones and go and get some fresh air. 

A couple of tracks are less memorable, but the only real mis-step is lead single Synthetic Mind, a plodding track whose simple piano part was influenced by John Carpenter, but which recalls the ponderous coffee-table techno and dolphin holograms of Cosmic Baby; but even this is enlivened by long descending synth tones, which could have soundtracked Hans Gruber falling from the Nakatomi building had Die Hard been set in the Jet Set Willy universe. To return to the glory days of jazz, this meticulously constructed record might not be the work of a trailblazer like Miles or Coltrane, but it sits alongside the thoughtful craftsmanship of Horace Silver and the gutsy kick of Cannonball Adderley: a pleasure for cool hepcats and cold androids alike.