Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of the new Swans record, To Be Kind. I know, this review, it's a little late but isn't it... it's two hours long! Gimme a break!

[Cal Chuchesta:]
Hey! Give him a break!

[Anthony Fantano:]
Give me a break!

[Cal Chuchesta:]
Give him a break!

[Anthony Fantano:]
What is on your wall?

[Cal Chuchesta:]
...Give him a break!

[Anthony Fantano:]
What is on your wall?! Are you spoiling the review right now?!

[Cal Chuchesta:]
I didn't mean to!

[Anthony Fantano:]
Get on the thing! Put your face on the thing!
Spoiler! Oh...

This is the latest LP from the long-running experimental rock band that formed over thirty years ago, Swans. In that thirty years, the band has gone through a lot of albums and lineup changes, live records and a breakup as well as a subsequent reformation. There's been a lot of sonic evolution as well, in their 80s and 90s output, you can hear everything from the grating sounds of noise rock, no wave and industrial to post-punk ambient music, post-rock as well as folk-rock and gothic rock leading up to the point when the band broke up.

[Cal Chuchesta:]
Anny, don't be so depressed, sad, worried, depressed! People don't really just care about the score, they really just want to hear what you gotta say about the music cause they love you so much.

[Anthony Fantano:]
You think so?

[Cal Chuchesta:]
Yeah, I know so!
[Anthony Fantano:]
You know what? I think you're right.

[Cal Chuchesta:]
I believe in you!

[Anthony Fantano:]
Yeah. I'm gonna do it! With all my heart and emotions.

[Cal Chuchesta:]
You go, girl!

[Anthony Fantano:]
Even though there's all these various genres in Swans' past, they seem to be on to something kind of new, with this latest string of records they've been working on, which I actually think started a little rocky with the LP My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope. The years between this record and 1996's Soundtracks For the Blind were not spent completely silent. I believe there was a Swans B-Sides record that came out and Michael Gira was spending a lot of time on solo efforts, collaborations and bands like Angels of Light, which Swans was sounding eerily alike when they came out with this comeback record over here. However, the sort of gothic, folk and country vibes that came through in that project were changed significantly once Swans dropped The Seer in 2012. It was a record that saw the band filling out their sound with backup vocals, electric guitar, vibraphone, dulcimer, woodwinds, pianos, synths, chimes, Swans' ambition was unignorable from an instrumental standpoint but from a compositional standpoint as well since this record has some of the group's most long and challenging material yet, especially with the 32-minute title track on this thing. It was material that was just unsettling, very disturbing, hairraising, but explosive as well and groove-heavy too, like on tracks such as Mother of the World which has these just stuttering riffs that repeat, repeat, repeat, and Swans take these repetitive stuttering riffs and just build and build and build on them with larger instrumentation or they manage to bring a really clever musical transition through. Moments like this in a way sort of reminded me of the songwriting that Swans were embarking on with the longer tracks off of Soundtracks For the Blind with the constantly ascending instrumentation on those songs, but they were definitely going for a different vibe, and they had just a larger, more grander presentation on The Seer. It's like on this record they really returned to improve upon the formula they were working with in the mid-90s. So, it's no surprise that on this latest record from Swans, we see these folk influences drift away even further, and instead, we're getting this larger emphasis on heaviness, on instrumental density, on slow, incremental progression, with a lot of these songs as they move along become hulking monstrosities that are impossible to take down.