To Be Kind

Michael Gira re-formed Swans in 2010, and To Be Kind, released in May 2014 on his own Young God label in North America and on Mute everywhere else, is the third album that line-up made. It runs ten songs and a little over two hours. Gira turned 60 that February. Fans paid for it in advance by buying Not Here / Not Now, a handmade double live CD sold through the label’s website, and much of the material came from the road as well. “With the songs developed live, the central idea was the groove,” he told Fact.

Rehearsals started at Sonic Ranch, outside El Paso, in early October 2013. John Congleton recorded the sessions there and in his Dallas studio, and the mixing was done by mid-December. The band was the one that had toured since the reunion: Gira, Norman Westberg and Kristof Hahn on guitars and lap steel, Christopher Pravdica on bass, and Phil Puleo and Thor Harris on drums and percussion. Bill Rieflin, then drumming for King Crimson and credited as “Honorary Swan Forever”, added drums, piano, synths and guitar. Rieflin died in 2020. Pitchfork counted seven of the ten songs among the live tracks and demos of Not Here / Not Now, most of them reworked since.

“Bring the Sun / Toussaint L’Ouverture” is the centrepiece, at 34 minutes. Gira says it was developed entirely on stage, growing out of the end of “The Seer”, and that in the studio they mostly played it live and orchestrated the rest. The words came last. The music needed some, he started screaming “Toussaint!”, and the song turned into one about the leader of the Haitian revolution, whose biography he was reading. “Just a Little Boy (For Chester Burnett)” went the other way. On tour it had been much harder, and in the studio that sounded puerile to him, so they played it soft and quiet, with Gira singing in the room with the band. Only afterwards did he decide Howlin’ Wolf, born Chester Burnett, had been speaking through him, and dedicate the song to him.

Gira wanted a lot of women’s voices on the record, holding long notes against the guitars. St. Vincent came through Congleton, her producer, and sings on four songs; Gira said he used her like an organ or a string section. Cold Specks adds gospel parts to “Bring the Sun”, and his fiancée, Jennifer Church, sings on two tracks. On “Some Things We Do”, with strings arranged and played by Julia Kent, Little Annie was meant to sing alone; Gira joined her and then merged the two voices in the mix, “like one human being”. “Kirsten Supine” is an acoustic song worked up in the studio, his homage to the scene in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia where Kirsten Dunst lies naked in the light of the approaching planet. The bass riff of “Oxygen” started as something Gira played on acoustic guitar with his thumb. By his account Pravdica plays it far better, and the band had a year of shows behind the song before recording it.

Critics were close to unanimous. AnyDecentMusic’s average was 8.6 and Metacritic’s 88 from 35 reviews. Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman gave it 9.2 and called it “every bit The Seer’s equal”, and the site placed it sixth in its year-end list, one spot above Sun Kil Moon’s Benji. It reached No. 37 on the Billboard 200 and No. 38 in the UK, the first time Swans made the top 40 in both. The holdouts were about length. The Guardian’s Jon Dennis gave it three stars and found it “uncompromising to the point of overindulgence”, likening the long track to the Doors playing “The End” forever.

That complaint is the right place to argue from, because the two hours are the case for the record, not against it. Gira’s rule, by his own account, was to let each piece run only as long as it stayed urgent, then sequence the whole for changes in texture. Most of these songs had been tried on audiences during 18 months of touring, and the ones that did not hold up were rewritten, quietened or rebuilt in the studio. Nothing is padding, and the record never asks for patience it hasn’t earned. Of the albums released in 2014, none made better use of its length, and none was better. It ends on the title track, played much as the band had played it on stage for eighteen months.