Jarboe's singing styles vary from childlike voices to climbing choral backups sung with space-odyssey breathlessness. His words are disturbed expulsions of fear and anger that take on a sarcastic, bitter tone, as in the opening lines of "She Lives!": "Now I just want to thank you for going insane every second that you suffer is a loss that I gain." Gira bellows from deep inside his thin frame, his delivery calling up a crooning, Sinatra-esque character-perhaps a bit more monotone: a calm, mellow front masking something ugly and forbidden. When he says "I love everyone," we know exactly what he means (he doesn't). Gira, a lugubrious songwriter on a par with Ian Curtis, has a way of hitting the lyrical nail on the head with one deft slam of his hammer. ![]() ![]() The music is tightly orchestrated, with dynamics added by rhythmically chugging acoustic guitars and keyboards sounding at times like the stringboards of a broken piano, or a demented new-age synthesizer. Snippets of horror-movie soundtrack back Michael Gira's low thorazine crooning. Songs are accented with samples and eerie keyboards, supported with powerful drumming by Ministry's Bill Rieflin and other guests. The Great Annihilator is another sweeping rock opera. Their first new release in three years, it combines the hard-hitting percussion of the earlier albums with the prettier, ballad-heavy later songs. This is the eighteenth Swans record released since 1982's Filth set a precedent for painful soul-searching dirge. Viewed in the context of the Swans' 12-year journey from audio pornography to majestic romanticism, The Great Annihilator serves as an epic apotheosis. Taken on its own, this album is a vivid example of how to combine the dissonant with the dulcet while retaining a dangerous edge. On "Mother/Father" and the mantric "My Buried Child," vocalist Jarboe outdoes herself with a spectrum of darkly distinctive voices. With a kinetic industrial goose step, "She Lives!" plays with chanted images of madness and martyrdom, while the jagged coda of "Celebrity Lifestyle" lays the groundwork for a cutting look at material dreams: "She's just a drug addiction/ And a self-reflecting image of a narcoticized mind." "Warm" forms the album's thematic center, overflowing with ethereal vocal loops and drums that patter like raindrops accross the lyrical landscape. Spirituality - or rather the absence of it - provides the linking motif. Their 12th album, The Great Annihilator, is a majestic symphony of haunting melodies and shifting moods. Vocalist Michael Gira traded his guttural growl for the croon of a balladeer, and the latter-day Swans were born. Then, around '87 or so, rock's ugliest ducking found its inner Swan and blossomed into a vehicle for sweeping, complex arrangements of keyboards, strings and evocative sound effects. Cacophonous, confrontational, and unrelentingly loud, the band used vocal rants and bone-crunching distortion to achieve unparalleled levels of sonic pain. In 1983, when Melody Maker magazine dubbed the NYC noise mavens "a deeply repulsive form of audio pornography," it was more a compliment than a slam. There's some reviews below if that's any help to you - Michael Gira/Young God Records 2008 ![]() I can still listen to most of this sometimes, so that counts for something. Band members and Jarboe and Bill Rieflin etc came and went, and somehow we crafted this thing into what it became. It was a complete nightmare to make (but then, all the Swans albums were!).I lived in a tent in a mosquito infested studio right next to Cabrini Green in Chicago for what (?) something like 3 months, rarely leaving. Anyway, I think this album holds together well. Too much reverb here and there, but not as intrusive as some other Swans releases (I used to be infatuated with Phil Spector and naively figured that adding reverb could get the same effect). This album is actually really good in a lot of ways.
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