Swans — To Be Kind

To Be Kind is the thirteenth album from Swans, and their third album since they resurrected in 2010. Following on from 2012’s The Seer this is another lengthy double disc CD set, and it sees the band continuing on with their often taut, tensioned & repetitious sound, which here moves from: noise rock, slurred blues, edgy dark funk, apocalyptic  rock, & post-rock, with some side roads into more noise-bound & expermentail based sounds.

Let me start by saying I’ve followed this project since around 1996’s Soundtracks For The Blind, and have enjoyed pretty much everything the band has put out over the years.  I also rated The Seer as one of their great works- so I was very much looking forward to hearing To Be Kind. And I’ve now been playing the album on & off since mid 2014, but I’ve waited until now to finally try & review it…so I’m sure your wondering why wait such a long time to review the album?

Well the length of time is partly down to wanting to give the album time to fully sink in, but mainly I kept hoping I would start to enjoy the elements I didn’t like about the album. You see the problem with To Be Kind is it’s too front loaded- the first disc is hands down breath-taking & amazing, and it finds over this discs five tracks the  band deeping & adding to their hypotonic sound by the addition of  new genre touches like taut funk, subtle electronic noise, as well as new instrumental layers.

And then you have disc two and it’s five tracks, and to be frank most if not all of these tracks just feel tired, bland & rather clichéd. Were the first disc’s tracks all had urgency, depth, and invention, the second discs material just feels unrewarding, overlong & mostly throw-away.  As I say above I have kept coming back to this album again & again over the last six  so or months, and sadly no matter how many times I've tried  playing the second disc I just came away both disappointed & frankly a little bored. Where as the first disc is still a great piece of work, and I’m still finding new elements & details in the tracks even now.

The Seer was simple put a great example of a lengthy double CD album release, as each & every track seem to work well on it own, but they also came together to create a conistent & rewarding whole album. Sadly only the first disc of To Be Kind can be counted as consistent & rewarding, with too much of the second disc feeling either lacklustre or like the band on auto-pilot. So all this makes this very diffcult to give this release a final score…I’d say disc one is easily a 5/5, but disc two is 2/5…so I’ll give the whole thing a 3/5.