Swans – The Seer

August 28, 2012 • Young God Records

So Swans are pretty serious about this reunion, I suppose. My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was an alright, if unmemorable, start; but I can tell the gloves are coming off with monstrosity that is The Seer. It might still not be as focused and consistent as their early material, but it can definitely hold its own in their discography.

This album comes off, to me, as a combination of My Father... and their other landmark double-album Soundtracks for the Blind: The Seer is just as grand in scope, as you can tell just from looking at the track lengths. Somehow it still has a very rock-oriented sound, much more homogenous than Soundtracks' sound which jumped from drone to ambient to rock and back. There's still elements of all that here, especially the rock and drone, but organized differently, much more like My Father... was. It has a very hypnotic repetitive sound, like a stripped-down version of Branca's The Ascension—some sort of droning psychedelic no-wave post-kraut-rock abomination. All par for the course for Swans, naturally.

One thing I hear mentioned a lot, and complained about a lot, is the album's length. Yes, it's a long album with long songs. Does it justify the longness? That's debatable. Unlike Soundtracks which had a lot going on over its two discs, The Seer has fewer ideas and just expands on them for a longer time. It's a different approach, not necessarily better or worse, but for me there are definitely some filler sections and repetition that could be done without. Some of the tracks' runtimes are entirely justified, like the two long tracks on disc two (oddly enough), but I don't really see the point of bits like "The Wolf" or "The Daughter Brings the Water" or the obnioxous "93 Ave. B Blues", or the longevity of "Mother of the World", which is fine but doesn't do much to justify ten minutes.

But when The Seer gets good, it gets good, and most of the tracks are shining examples—"A Piece of the Sky" is one of the best and one of the album's highest points; it has fantastic composition and an excellent last third to justify twenty minutes of the listener's time; not a minute is wasted. I just wish they could have kept up that kind of quality for some the shorter tracks. Of course there are a few that are really cool—I like "The Seer Returns"' almost hip hop-like beat, or the way "Avatar" and "The Apostate" use tubular bells and tribal drums to evoke a tense and foreboding atmosphere, or the pure furious intensity of "The Apostate"'s intro. Just great.

While My Father didn't do a lot to nab my attention, The Seer has done the job just fine, and it's clear that Swans (and Gira especially) still have it in them, even if they might not have the chops to produce two hours' worth of amazing music at once quite yet. Like all Swans albums, on the whole it's nothing I find amazingly mind-blowing, but it's consistently as good as most of the rest of their material and anyone who liked their other stuff will find something to love about The Seer. It almost feels like they never left us at all, and hopefully they won't do it again anytime soon.

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