My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is an advance for Swans, and Gira comes across as less of an eccentric noise-generator, and more of a presence that requires our attention.

Make no mistake, Gira has his mojo back and Swans are very much alive.

The most impressive thing about My Father's seething, swaggering intensity is that it keeps it up.

Swans' bleakness is beset with great beauty, black wings to another world.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky, from the title's evocation of righteous death on down to its suffusion with keening strings and other touches of sonic Americana, is an attempt to come to terms with the dark heart of history, with that ultimate question: if we are born into crime and monstrous darkness, how do we become more than that past?

Swans always understood better than most post-punk bands that the crushing, wall-of-sound repetition pioneered by Glenn Branca could be taken to its logical, nihilistic extreme in rock-n-roll.

Recognizable shapes of jazz and post-rock often accompany Gira's baritone croon, but they're always delivered between passages of fastidiously crafted clamor that's as cauterizing as ever.

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky distills everything Gira has ever done. It's a shockingly dense record, the Gira experience in 45 minutes or less. All killer, no filler, for real.

Dig deeper, though, and what we have here is a record more in line with the excellent, vengeful Americana of frontman Michael Gira's latter-day Angels Of Light fare. [Oct 2010, p.106]

Swans are alive, utterly. A terrible beauty is reborn. [Sep 2010, p.51]

My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky sounds more like the essence of Michael Gira than the Angels Of Light ever did, and ought to also serve as another broadside to the idea of reformations being inherently grubby and uncreative ventures.

All this serves to underscore that My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky is a mercilessly intense and beautiful record that only Swans could pull off, and that no matter who plays in the band, Gira was and is Swans: their sound, their musical and poetic vision, their heartbeat.

Thirteen years after they retired Swans return with thunderous tour de force. [Oct. 2010, p. 104]

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky submits to no such relaxed idleness. It earns the right to avoid the term reunion, picking up right where the band left off.

A majestic return and, let us hope, a harbinger of more to come.

My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky sounds more like the essence of Michael Gira than the Angels Of Light ever did, and ought to also serve as another broadside to the idea of reformations being inherently grubby and uncreative ventures.

It's certainly an all-encompassing, monolithic piece of work, an album that'll make a bunch of people suddenly relieved that there's another Swans album, in a we've missed you kind of way.

My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues.

It's an album that marries the buzzsaw abrasion of past Swans' albums with the country-cum-death-blues feel of his work with Angels of Light. That's an easy way to explain it, anyway.

Whilst this may be its chief difficulty, and one that will undoubtedly deter and daunt some listeners, it is nevertheless good to have a band and an artist with this darkly poetic a vision back recording and performing once again.

It's an album that draws on blues and gospel alongside atmospheric art-rock to end up somewhere intriguing, unnerving and frequently overwhelming. [16 Oct 2010, p.52]

If David Browne's Sonic Youth bio was to be believed, Swans, who emerged from the same noise-filled no wave scene in New York's early 80s as Thurston Moore, had a rotating cast of nasty-tempered psychotic rockers, with multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira at its centre. Listening to Swans' new album, the first in 14 years, you get the sense that some of that malevolence remains.