Swans — The Glowing Man
I guess it’s fair to say the album as a whole really sees the collective deepening, layering, and pushing their trademark thick & receptive sound to its most extreme. The layers of instrumentation, take in the likes of: acoustic/ electrics guitars, bass guitar dulcimer, layered vocals/chants, percussion/ drums, synth, mellotron, vibes, bells, piano, trumpet, mandolin, banjo, & flute. And these are quite often built into a huge wall of sound, with even Gira’s vocals mostly taking on a minimal mantra like feel. This certainly isn’t the most lyrically rich or complex of Swan’s album, as his vocals often just feel like another layer to the sound, instead of verbalising emotion, or telling a story, etc.
Fitting the albums main sonic focus of building-to-wall like compositions. The band blending in sonic genre elements such as: minimalism, bringing to mind the thick & simply spiralling composition of the likes Reich & Glass. The set and trance inducing locked churn of bleak kraut-rock. With dips into malevolent classical composition, moody sound-tracking like blocks of sound, & mournful choral music.
At times the sound does thin back, become more fragile, or sparse- but still there is that taut-ness & tensioned feel to even these moments. And really the band as a whole never really seems to move back from that setting, meaning the whole thing does often feel a little set in it’s mood and attack.
The two discs take in a total of around two hours, and eight tracks- with two of these ,one on each disc, coming in nearing the half an-hour mark. I guess really how much you enjoy/ get-this-album is down to how much you like the Swans when they are at their tautest & dense. For myself I do enjoy that side of the bands sound to a certainly extent, but pretty much none the stop switching between building-to- full thick-iness does get tiresome. The other thing is often the track seem rather indistinctive in both thier melodies & the way the instrumentation is built together…so sadly at times playing through this album as a whole, I had to check which track I was on.
On the whole I’d say The Glowing Men, is the lesser of the trilogy of albums from this version of the Swans. It just feels too often that the band are relying heavily on repeating the same sound & familiar repetitive template again & again, with out really adding enough new or different elements to the mix. So as a result it feels like the band are just going through the motions more often than not. Yes some of what’s here is most effective & powerful, and I could see that these elements would be even more enhanced in a live setting. All in all it’s not a complete failure, and there are positives here- it’s just too much of it sees the band re-living past glories & ideas. Apparently the band will having a different line-up/ sonic set-up from this point forward, and I’m certainly glad to hear that, as really a re-birth of the Swan’s sound is now long over-due.