Previews | MUSIC
POST-PUNK/EXPERIMENTAL SWANS The Arches, Glasgow, Fri 16 Nov
‘I see it all, I see it all, I see it all, I see it all,’ intones Michael Gira on the title track of Swans’ latest album, The Seer. Having carved out a 30-plus year career as a musician, label boss, artist and author, indeed the enigmatic frontman has seen it all.
It is this experience, picked up from a lifetime on the outside, which informs The Seer, Gira’s second LP since reforming the pioneering noisemongers in 2010. The album taps into the rich musical vein first excavated on 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, but rich hackle-raising noise, a hallmark of the band’s early days, also finds its way into the groove. The cohesiveness of the piece is a testament to the personnel that Gira has employed across
the record, the same band the singer will use at this Arches show. Having played in Glasgow twice in as many years, he's looking forward to bringing his troupe back to the stage. ‘It keeps me alive. It’s what I was put on earth to do,’ he says. ‘We are quite a family. We are all good friends, which is kind of a first for Swans, there’s always been big conflicts in the band in the past. There’s six of us onstage and it’s hopefully a very monumental and pleasurable ordeal,’ he laughs.
Determined not to rehash old ground, the key factor that keeps the project alive for Gira, he has promised a unique performance for fans. ‘I want to use the recorded material as a starting point to build something for live shows. The set is constantly morphing and shifting in terms of intensity. As we tour, the performance constantly changes, I never just want to play a record. Hopefully when we are up there and it’s working, we all get lifted up and transported by the sound. It carries us rather than us making it, that’s what it’s all about. It takes every molecule of energy and will I have – but I think that is a healthy thing.’ (Chris Taylor)
DARK ELECTRONICA CRYSTAL CASTLES ABC, Glasgow, Mon 26 Nov
Despite their often-unsettling musical supremacy, Toronto’s Crystal Castles occasionally seem wilfully confrontational without a surplus of substance to back it up. They’ve shot up in our estimation after a interview ahead of LP Crystal Castles (III), however, where singer Alice Glass lambasted a different brand of women in pop music (eg Katy Perry and Lady Gaga) for oversexualising shows essentially aimed at children. It needed saying, and kudos to her for saying it. Crystal Castles (III), perhaps even more so than
2008’s Crystal Castles and 2010’s Crystal Castles (II), seems pitched by Glass and Ethan Kath to capture a darkness in 2012’s zeitgeist: the cover is Samuel Aranda’s World Press Photo-winning monochrome print; a woman in a burka cradling her naked, tear-gassed son after a demonstration in Yemen. Yet for all their outspokenness and violent imagery, CC are not given to political sloganeering.
Quite the opposite – strobe-flared live shows and Glass’ naked shriek form a wonderfully unnerving, exciting spectacle, but this album demonstrates a subtler breadth of tone during the warm, Knife-like resignation of ‘Affection’, the uncomfortably over- produced pop of ‘Sad Face’ and goth electro of ‘Transgender’. They’re a band redolent of danger, and a generation surrounded by static noise and uncertainty, yet within their masterfully-crafted aesthetic they get away without saying much at all. (David Pollock) ■ Crystal Castles (III) is out now on Mute.
PROFILE JENS LEKMAN
Born Gothenburg, Sweden, 1981
Background Sweden’s most lovably literate, witty and wistful indie-pop bard began his recording career circa 2000 with a string of outstanding lo-fi EPs revealing clever samples mixed with more traditional singer-songwriter elements. His 2004 debut album When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog was followed by 2007’s Night Falls Over Kortedala and 2012’s equally near- flawless I Know What Love Isn’t. On corresponding with fans Forget Facebook or Twitter, Jens likes to keep it old-school and direct through the Small Talk section of his retro HTML website. Email him on a set topic of the month (recent examples include teenage rebellion, platonic love and coffee), and he’ll respond. ‘I see our communication as an exchange, not a service,’ he explains.
On getting dumped ‘You don’t get over a broken heart, you just learn to carry it gracefully,’ croons Lekman, in the defining line from his current album. Written over a hot summer in Melbourne after being ditched by a long-term girlfriend, it’s an intelligently bittersweet reflection on the emotional cycle of a bad break-up and ‘grey areas’ of love, full of raw honesty and pathos. On stalking Kirsten Dunst For all the sad stuff, there’s humour in abun- dance in Lekman’s music – see the recent An Argument With Myself EP. ‘Waiting for Kirsten’ is the story of a shambolic attempt to meet the actress in Gothenburg after she namedrops him in a local newspaper ahead of a shoot in the city, while the title track finds Lekman drunkenly stumbling around Melbourne after- hours subjecting himself to some hilariously schizophrenic chastising: ‘Fuck you,’ Jens cusses Jens. ‘No, you fuck you.’ (Malcolm Jack) ■ The Arches, Glasgow, Sun 25 Nov.
15 Nov–13 Dec 2012 THE LIST 77