Swans : To Be Kind

To Be Kind sees experimental post-rock titans Swans continue with the sound developed in their 2012 release, The Seer. Released under the band’s own label, Young God Records, To Be Kind can only be described as a refined savagery, with unsettling metronomic tracks shackling listener and music together with its dark instrumentals and near flawless structure.

Running for an arduous two hours (including a 34 minute track less than half way through the album), To Be Kind is more of a battle than your standard 'headphones on the metro' listening experience. Many of the songs are structurally dependant on repetition as vocalist Michael Gira constantly sings the same line over and over with little variation - all the while the music lurking into crescendo at a snail's pace. This instils a bizarre metronomic effect that lingers in the head of the listener in the same way that a clock ticks; only Gira successfully replaces that clock with the horrifying chants of a dark evangelist screaming “FUCK!” over and over.

However it's not all following a single formula - tracks like Oxygen work like a perversive throwback to the band’s sound circa 1990s, taking the same catchy rock sound but twisting it with catatonic vocals and rhythmic stabs of noise-rock riffs. I’m Just a Little Boy (for Chester Burnett) divides the album by putting a calm, yet eerie blues track into the fray and the closer/title track To Be Kind is provides a mellow, bittersweet end to an otherwise chaotic album.

What works best for the album is that outside of all the strangeness in the vocal styles, 30 minute long songs, cult chanting and other general weirdness - there's a successful amalgamation of blues, post-rock, noise-rock and experimental themes here which shows that there are still bands who are willing to throw something into the rock genre that isn’t about haircuts and familiarity. To Be Kind may be the antithesis of conventional music, but to those willing to pay attention it’s a goldmine for pushing conventional boundaries and sating one’s curiosity.  

BY THOMAS BRAND

Best Track: She Loves Us!
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: RUSSIAN CIRCLES, early LIARS, NEUROSIS
In A Word: Horrifying

Here's a submission I made to Beat Mag. Might as well keep something on retainer here hey?

I'm now working for an online E-zine.

Soon to go to print. The name is 7/62 and can be found here:

http://www.sevensixtytwo.net/

That's where I'll be writing from now on. Stuff will be different from what I'm used to writing but a job is a job and I'm pretty optimistic that this is going to be a decent read!

Thanks for the support guys x

Have A Nice Life - The Unnatural World (proper review)

Posted this review to Rate Your Music. Thought anyone who read my first impression might want to read this guy...

After giving the album many listens, I still feel like it's got a lot of flaws. There are maybe three songs here that are genuinely good, but let's pull the album apart piece by piece.

Guggenheim Wax Museum has a big and unsettling sound. It's a positive thing and it works for the track, but at the same time you can't help but feel like the production could have been better, no matter how intentionally poor it might have been.

Defenestration Song needed to have the improvement in vocals, but really didn't need to have any of the riffs dumbed down. That really uninspiring shred part in the middle just ruined the song for me.

Burial Society is probably one of the stronger tracks, but I can't help but feel like the end of the song isn't as well planned or laid out as that ominous, haunting start.

Music Will Untune the Sky and get skipped every playthrough.

Cropsey is kind of cool but the introduction goes on too long to make the song one you'll go back to. You'll listen once, enjoy it, and then every time you want to go back it'll feel like a long walk for little reward.

Actually, to cut it short, I think the only song on the second half of the album that really interested me one way or another would probably be Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate - if not for the rolling bass line and airy vocals. This was probably one of the best songs on the album because it didn't feel like they were trying to do anything but make a good song.

The album is BLIGHTED by ironic attempts at 'deep' and 'different' production and average song writing. I've taken caution to not review this as 'Deathconsciousness II' but even then, this album has definite and obvious flaws that shouldn't be over-sighted just because Dan's Giles Corey releases and DC were all good or at least interesting. Treat this as it's own beast - a beast with a few good songs but ultimately lacking in staying power.

Kidcrash - Jokes

Kidcrash - Turtleelephant

From start to finish, a brilliantly technical and involving album. Every instrument played here is working with eachother to create a monster of a song. Youtube informs me that you can download the album for free at http://bit.ly/i5tXb5

I'm in the middle of a phase that has seen me getting into a bunch of post-hardcore / skramz bands and I've gotta say I'm enjoying it. Highly reccommended in the genre lies Kidcrash's album, Jokes, which offers many solid tracks of highly technical post-hardcore jams, tonally similar to other bands in the field while being far more advanced in a subtle way.

The album manages to guard the talent of every instrumentalist by using an odd guitar tone, cleaner than your standard rock, metal or hardcore band. Other bands with similar song structure such as Gospel or Between The Buried And Me have worked with a highly produced, heavy toned chaos that while impressive, has a certain 'showoff' air to it which I always found quite jarring. Kidcrash's clean guitar and more modest structuring still has that 'showoff' vibe without going over the top with it, resulting in what I feel is a much more listenable album than works from the previously mentioned artists.

Back to the instrumentals, each instrument is carefully attuned to the rest of the song. Both guitars seem to dance through eachother's riff work, creating airy progressions and crushing jams. The bass doesn't simply follow the rest of the music but rather creates it's own tone behind the song, while the drums are constantly changing the pace of the song to the point where the same riff could have been played three, four times but it would have sounded completely different due to the drums snapping off in these brilliant flowing rock style jams. The vocals are kept to an absolute minimum and are barely emphasised in comparisson to the rest of the music, cutting in like an extra instrument used minimalistically in the same way that some samples or synths are used structurally in other songs.

As a guy who loves his instruments, I can really see the value of an album like this. I'm sorry to lay this one down with pseudo technical bullshit, but this is one of the best constructed albums that I've listened to without having to deal with the wankerish tone that you could expect from music so well constructed (I'm looking at you BTBAM with your goddamn clean vocals, hour long chained song album and stupid jazzy well produced jams smacked together in one of the most frustrating strucutral clusterfucks I've ever heard/liked).

So yeah, give these guys a listen if you want a mix between Gospel/BTBAM and Fall of Troy/Crash of Rhinos. Really fantastic shit. Kind of trails off at the end of the album on the first few listens, but I'm finding an appreciation for every song and I'd easily give the album a 4.9 out of 5.

Old Love

http://oldloveaus.bandcamp.com/

Here's a 5 track EP that my mate put me onto. The songs are a nice mix of several genres - Post hardcore, Hardcore, Skramz/emoviolence and a couple of prog-sludgy segments as well. The interesting thing is that a lot of the riff work is quite unexpected and dark while still sounding very post hardcore, however still staying heavy and strong as if it never left the hardcore itself. The melodic follow-ups complement the heavier sections well.

Give it a shot if you want. Or don't. Fuck you.

Tom Odell - Long Way Down

Tom Odell - Another Love
Listen closely people, this is how you make a song APPEAR to be good.

Now the thing that brought my attention to this album is that NME slammed it with a 0/10 review which would indicate that it has no redeeming features, AT ALL. So I got my hands on it and gave it a listen, keeping in mind the criticisms that the NME review had, saying the album did nothing original and took elements from all the industry's most boring indie artists of the time and put it into this album. What was my verdict? Well...

There's things this album does right. The album's production and song structure are pretty stellar - it's got a big stadium vibe and the addition of piano puts it a little bit apart from similar bands in the genre - but the review was right. This does sound like an amalgamation of Mumford and Sons/Florence and the Machine.

However, the album shits me. The first thing that threw me off about the album is that it kept falling flat lyrically. Odell would be setting up the verses to what should have been wrapped with brilliant metaphors, but those metaphors never came. Matter of fact he'd do a disservice to his songs by setting up some brilliant piano numbers but then having really, really, incredibly, awfully, terribly shallow pop lyrics, constant moans in the backing vocals and repetition of themes and song structure. It's very well constructed, but just annoying to have to listen to because of the repetition and the overall cheesiness. It kind of shits me in the same way that Imagine Dragons do because it feels like I'm listening to a giant cliche.

Alright, I'm cutting it off here. I'm getting a little bit annoyed at how something that has such good production could still wind up being repetitive and shallow. I mean not to say it's a bad album, if you're into that channel V bullcrap, this album is for you... But I've had my stint of listening to piano heavy albums (or at least tracks) and the piano is not an instrument you take lightly, or pair up with a complete lack of dynamic or meaningful lyrics.

Fuck man. I mean that NME guy is a tool because this is at least a 5+ for production alone, but after two listens in I'm getting angry at the album.

Have A Nice Life: The Unnatural World advance play on P4k

New England shoegazers Have A Nice Life (Consisting of Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga) are finally back to make you feel awful about everything with the release of their highly anticipated album, The Unnatural World. This album takes a step back from their dreamier, poppier tones from their previous album, and decides to create a more focused, darker album.

I have yet to write a proper review for this one. I'm letting it sink in fully before I go out of the way to type up a post about it. However, I will say this - my first impressions are that Dan Barrett knows he's got a following now, and I believe he's using that to try and get away with making some less than fantastic tunes by experimenting or forgoing dynamics. He and Tim are still keeping it quite interesting though, they've thrown in what I percieve to be post-punk elements with the song Unholy Life, darker indie rock elements with Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate.

So far my favourite song is Burial Society. Listening to Guggenheim Wax is what despair sounds like - wretched, drawn out, taunting you like some kind of fucked up voice in the distance, and as an opener it sets up the album really well. The remix of Defenestration Song is not as bad as I gave it credit for, but still feels like they've mixed it a bit crap for artistic merits. 

It's as if the negativity that festered in Dan's Giles Corey project has bled into this album. The passion of both the musicians isn't as vibrant as it was over Deathconsciousness and the Voids EP, it's a manifestation of misery. Like I said before, this is much, much closer to what despair would sound like if you gave it form, not loud but drawn out, taunting you from behind a wall of ambience in a similar way to how the mind taunts a person when everything else is background noise.

http://pitchfork.com/advance/317-the-unnatural-world/