Avant-garde milestone

The cover, of course! My first contact with Swans was characteristically produced not through their music, but by looking at this bleak, disturbing cover of her new album The Seer. That I lived until last week in complete ignorance of this post punk veterans amazed myself all the more because I always understood me as audiophile man and actually over them would inevitably have to stumble. Perhaps it is also the fact that you have to be just right for a band like Swan. After extensive test listening I noted, however, that I was experiencing something that is not often happened to me in recent years: this is music that takes me on a spiritual journey and emotionally integrates, even if the last note already has died away.

Michael Gira (which also includes the creepy teeth on the cover include) Swans creative mind, The Seer regarded as the culmination of more than thirty years of band history, and indeed can this emphasis with its nearly two hours of running time as Opus designate Magnum.

Heavy drones wide from an elegiac, almost spiritual soundscape, spread to the inside to be gently increasingly complex structures and created a music breitwandiges paintings. With so much creative freethinking always there is a danger of pompous Pretentiösen, but Swan create the feat, always on the verge of getting the bending. Unlike much of what is now hyped up and running in the charts, you can here the individual pieces time to develop and to transfer pure emotion. This may be a tedious and perhaps even annoying or painful experience for the untrained ear, but she opens her eyes for that, which is compositionally possible but no longer ventured into the world of mainstream ironed popular music. Therefore it is not surprising that no major label The Seer wanted to produce Michael Gira scraped together the necessary budget itself and therefore did not have to engage in compromise.

On a total of three longplayers (vinyl), an intensive film in the mind's eye of the listener runs, forcing him to concentrate solely on him as it once was with Pink Floyd and the likes, and at the moment probably only the Flower Kings, Flaming Lips or Flying Lotus (weird, all with "F") get. This music can not you just hear the way in the car or on the train and you should not least be purchased on vinyl.

The Seer will not make a bulky work inevitably a lot of sales, but is the latest Swans herewith a place in the music Olympus safely. Music Historically perhaps the most important album of the year.

The vinyl edition comes as a 3-LP-Bundle with (added: superfluous) Posters and mp3-download code, packaged adequately protected - the wheels are almost entirely black (including the label in the middle).