HAPPINESS IS GUARANTEED – RAW POWER: SWANS LIVE AT BROOKLYN MASONIC TEMPLE & BOWERY BALLROOM

If there were any doubts raised by the seemingly random reactivation of long dormant NYC noise behemoth, SWANS, or their generally very good but slightly spotty new album, then they were crushed brutally, repeatedly and gleefully into dust and snorted up Michael Gira’s eager nostrils and bellowed back out in punishing sonic bliss as the band steam-rolled through Brooklyn and Manhattan this past weekend.  But, lest you think these shows were some sort of bullshit nostalgia trip, this was not your droopy-drawered grand pappy’s Swans.

It’s a new millennium and Gira has surrounded himself with a fantastic group including some old (most notably, long time guitarist, Norman Westburg) and new (MVP bassist, Chris Pravdica formerly of the terribly underrated bands, Gunga Din and Flux Information Sciences) Swans that play to his strengths.  The current six-piece band (augmented by two trombone players for the NYC dates) pummeled, soothed, unnerved and uplifted in equal measure.

An unending, hideous, piercing treble alarm/drone preceded the band both evenings.  The drone was eventually penetrated by a double-fisted, hammer-wielding Thor Harris (Angels of Light, Shearwater); who appeared before a large, homemade-looking set of tubular bells and began clanging away.  After several minutes he was joined by the rest of the band, but if the audience was anticipating some relief from the noise they were sorely disappointed.  Without ceremony the six-headed hydra (plus the brass players) blasted into a teeth-rattling crescendo of noise rock ecstasy that could easily withstand comparison to anything from the classic Swans’ canon.  This morphed into “No Words/No Thoughts”, the opening track from their new album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky.

The band spent the next hour and a half shooting the audience further and further into the stratosphere with some of the better songs from My Father (“Eden Prison”, “Jim”, “My Birth”) as well as some classics from Cop/Young God (1984) (“Your Property”, “I Crawled”).  The highlight of both nights, however, was culled from their seminal 1987 album, Children of God.  They dusted off and tore apart both the mighty “Sex God Sex” and the absolutely devastating “Beautiful Child”.  I’ve always found even the studio version of “Beautiful Child” to be one of the most disturbing vocal performances ever set to tape (let’s not even get started on any of the excellent versions from their old semi-official bootlegs such as Feel Good Now) the dictionary should have an accompanying sound sample of Gira screaming “I could kill the child” next to the word ‘unhinged’.  But really that was child’s play compared to the performances he gave both nights in NYC.  He clutched his guitar to his chest with both arms like a drowning man with a life preserver (or perhaps a psychopath with a dead child) and, scream really just doesn’t cover it, he let loose a primal howl that could make a drill sergeant soil his pants.

While being louder than God certainly does not differentiate the new Swans from the old, Gira’s stage presence did.  He chuckled and made jokes and, at one point, even introduced all the band members to the audience.  During all the shows I saw Swans perform before their initial demise in 1997, the most I ever heard Gira say to the audience was “thank you, good night.”  He seemed much more affable and human and even approachable at these shows, which were certainly not words one could use to describe his stage persona during the initial run of Swans (think: dour, taciturn, frightening).  The end of Swans seemed to lift a certain burden of expectation from him, which manifested itself in the live performance setting as a much more relaxed and humorous Gira.  The new incarnation of Swans seems to have brought about a new hybrid Michael Gira – part old-style hellfire (vigorously slapping himself in the face and screaming before starting the show, the violent vocals on “Beautiful Child”) and part bemused gentlemanly elder statesman (band introductions, opening act shout-outs, joking and actually enjoying himself enough to smile!).

But all good things must end, and after a very brief break the band returned for an encore mutilation of the closing track from My Father, “Little Mouth”.  The studio version is a relatively pleasant love song (granted a sad and demented one) featuring pretty vocals by Gira’s wife, Siobhan.  Live, the band deconstructed it into a harsh mutating wall of screeching noise, complete with trombone accompaniment, which came to an extremely abrupt halt, leaving all the musicians save Gira stuck in place like automatons whose charge had worn down.  Gira went on to perform the lyrics a cappella.  As he finished he too froze in place for close to a minute until he suddenly snapped out of it and said, “thank you, good night”, thus releasing the rest of the band from their stasis and adding a strange, disconcerting end to two wonderful shows.

Swans are dead.  Long live Swans.