There aren't words adequate to describe the joy that I felt upon hearing about the reformation of Swans. Although M. Gira has been working with and distributing new material under The Angels of Light for the better part of the last two decades, his work has taken a turn away from the sheets of noise and texture that made Swans so bizarrely cathartic. My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky represents a return to that sort of Faulknerian post-industrialism, bringing the fugues of Swans to the new pastoralism of The Angels of Light.
The title of Swans' first release in over ten years is the first sign of Gira's ministerial sarcasm, a feature that always seems to work its way into his music. The overlying theme of Gira's music is as present as ever – aspirations to godliness, or nirvana, or, as Gira describes "what will [presumably] be [his] only experience of heaven." But beneath that is a sort of vaudevillian assemblage of all of the greatest developments in Micheal Gira's aesthetic in the last twenty or thirty years. The harshness and monophony of Swans are as present as ever, but Gira also seems to have greatly expanded his influences during the Angels of Light era. New Weird America luminary Devendra Banhart, accompanied by Gira's daughter, sings sweetly about what I can only construe as the murder of a child, devolving at its climax to the rumbling sounds of pianos and horns, beckoning the corruption of beauty so familiar in Angels of Light albums We Are Him and How I Loved You.
Every moment of My Father Will Guide Me... is marked by a careful juxtaposition of beauty and acrimony, laid out for maximum pain and maximum effect. Only Michael Gira can do what Michael Gira does, and he does it well.
Please open my mind and take what is left,
Let me sup, oh let me suck, upon that which does not exist,
Teach the weak, oh teach me please, to cease to resist.
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