1983 @ 40: FILTH - SWANS

Swans were a problem from the start. 

Filth starts, continues and ends with a one approach: pulverise, repeat. There are basses, electric guitars, drums and vocals but not a crumb of rock music. There are chants where choruses would be but it isn't glam, either. So what does it sound like? Construction works across the road. Hammering, screaming drills and saws, yelling, the motion of powerful things that make other things move or shatter. Two sides of an LP or a seemingly endless grind of industry and tormenting cries for about forty-five minutes.

Who'd want to listen to that? Well, a lot of it has to do with when it was made. It's the early '80s and the music still rising from the ashes of punk is proving more progressive than the likes of ELP ever were. And transgressive. These songs are about domination, abuse, rape, subjugation and more. This music, highly disciplined for all its apparent chaos, is meant to feel like that. The band name was chosen from an observation that swans showed magnificent  outward beauty that concealed a brutal temprament. By extension, lift the veneer of civilisation and you'll find the same thing with humans. 

There are no explanations of any of this on the album art, you just have to find it out for yourself. If you can make it through the first track with its ugly, gurgling basses and thrashing drums almost drowning out the vocal that issues instructions for living as an unfeeling macho with the final twist of "come back for more!" Blackout confuses the meanings of a loss of power with a drugged loss of consciousness. Weakling, which sounds like a sheet metal processing plant, continues: "I don't feel pain. I never escape. I'm under the bed. I'm licking the floor." The surrounding whines and groans bash away until the victim narrator can only bellow, "this isn't real ... not ... real ... not ... real ... not ... real..." As twisted as The Birthday Party ever got there was usually some scrap of conventional musicality to help the medicine go down. Swans who apocryphally threatened a punter with violence for dancing to them, were good at making it clear that they were not going to come to you but the other way around. 

This is a rare case where comparisons with their peers works, simply because it was a time when a band like this had peers that also defied labelling. Swans got a fair few labels slapped on them: no wave, industrial, gothic, noise, dark romantic, and so on but all of that just peeled off. Like The Birthday Party, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus and so on, Swans were best described as their own thing. This was important at a time when post punk was showing clear signs of morphing into conventionality. It wasn't important to take an objectionable stance as a protest, though, it was important because there was still too much to say that needed to be said without compromise. Acts like these were never going to have massive global followings so it was crucial to keep the message clear of unnecessary sweeteners.

Filth offers nothing by way of sweetening. The drumming is 4/4 with few embellishments that might make it personable. The guitar is playing intervals but the effect is more of sheets of noise responding like one of the components of an assembly line. The basses (usually two at once) are the closest the band get to riffing but the figures are short and as perfectly repeated as possible. The vocals are the same kind of haranguing bellow with the only variation being that some tracks feature a delivery more like natural speech. You wouldn't call it singing. Its character is more like commands or taunts. There is no melody. In case you do get too much into it there are even moments that rob you of finding pleasure in it like the sudden stop in Freak which waits for a little too long to resume (and that's the shortest track). There is differentiation between tracks but it's from this one having a riff like structure and the next one being more of a storm. 

If that suggests chaos to you then you should know that every track on this album sounds like the result of immense preparation and perfection. This is not the work of whimsical free jazz jammers. The tracks are statements with lines in plain language packed tightly into musical presentations that admit of no distractions like melody or groove. If you aren't familiar with this record (or anything by Swans for the next five or so studio releases) you might conceivably be thinking of early Hunters and Collectors but, as harsh as that could get it still followed conventional rock formatting with riffs and melodic vocals (however primal they could get). This record and its immediate successors was directly reflective of the band's live performances and is effectively presented as a set in polished form. As such, it is executed to the same level of intimidating commitment to form. Seldom has a band from a rock context been so toughly military.

It's worth a note to describe the arc of the band from this point to now as it's illustrative of that commitment in whatever form they chose. After the first few releases (they have brought out a lot of live records) and some portents of future directions with instrumentation like brass sections or piano, that Swans changed tack several times. A lot of this had to do with the recruitment of Jarboe who brought her hefty musicality into the storm and stress bedrock, adding a classicism that, by its jarring opposition, could prove effectively eerie. Towards the end of the '80s with albums like Children of God and White Light at the Edge of Infinity the band became almost unrecognisably melodic and lyrical. This reached its head with the very smooth Burning World before roughing back down for the final two albums, by which time they were falling back on over a decade's worth of praxis and experimentation. After a long hiatus, Gira gathered different musicians (but included stalwart Norman Westberg on guitar who debuted on Filth) and released albums with mammoth tracks that harked back to the hammering early days but extended the range. 

I only saw Swans once, back in 2011. They played at Melbourne's Forum with the inspired choice of The Necks as support. The set was long and began with an unattended feedback drone that lasted for about ten minutes before anyone got to the stage. The rest of it was powerful and loud enough to be the first concert of my life that made me use earbuds. The audience was very mixed generation and I recall the alarming sight of a guy who looked about twenty loping in a kind of dance right beside one of the big bass bins that might have been doing as much to make him move as his own muscles. At one point Gira bellowed the phrase, "Jesus come down!" three times. It was so loud it felt like it was pushing all the air out of the room. The Forum is a magnificent building used for music as well as a cinema (it's original purpose) but during the '90s for a few years it was a Christian revival centre when last a phrase like that would have been heard within its walls. A friend who was there spoke for me when he said that, although he couldn't remember the details of much of the songs it was the best gig he'd ever been to. After that I got more of the early Swans records in a way that I'd only just appreciated before.

Swans are an experience rather than a songbook, however many songs from their later years are genuinely memorable. To hear them again is to recall or be informed that movements that challenge and change norms can seem to bloom brightest when threatened with absorption or defeat. If the drive behind this music was from the same kind of ultra-masculine machismo that they appear to oppose then it's also worth noting that the thing that the passing years leaves is the opposition.

1983 @ 40: PORCUPINE - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

After more than a year of touring and very little contact through the media the usual rumours of split ups circulated about Echo and the Bunnymen. Fellow Liverpudlians Teardrop Explodes had similarly fallen off the local radar and they had actually collapsed, never to regroup. The Birthday Party were no longer. As far as innovative rock music went, it was looking like the triumph by default of the synth duos. While I didn't have any objection to that but the idea that rock music was going out just at a time when it was convincingly washing itself of the cock rock cliches and making guitar band music relevant in the wake of punk. And then The Bunnymen released Porcupine.

The Cutter starts with a violin played Indian style, a wildly microtonal figure along the lines of the Beatles' use of Indian melody. It sawed into being with a strong motion, bending with portamenti at the top of the phrase and diving down again before the band crashes in with a clear and hard '80s bass tone. Ian McCulloch enters with a growl. "We're on the seventh floor, brewing alternatives ..." He hikes it up to the chorus for "spare us the cutter" before soaring with the second part "conquering myself until I see another hurt approaching. Say we will say we can. Not just another drop in the ocean. The opening riff repeats over the crisp gated drums and that nifty bass. Second verse but the melody is changed stepping down from the fourth through the major scale: "Come to the free for all with sellotape and knives ..."  The chorus punches back in but instead of ending with the riff again everything bursts into widescreen with what sounds like the massed pipes of McGlaggen playing a solid modal figure. McCulloch croons low over this about a happy loss as a big contrapuntal figure on guitar and strings plays against the reeds. Another chorus that leads to a break with the bass riff before yet another brief melody on the vocals "watch the fingers close when the hands are cold" Actually, that should be "coooooooooooold" as he sings the syllable over the second explosion of the third section in one of his characteristically operatic held notes. And it's in that voice, over the strings and guitars that he sings the happy loss part but an octave higher. If you aren't already doing a frantic rain dance by this point then the good folk of Flock of Seagulls are over there. This avalanche of pure joy repeats and comes to a clean finish and you already need to hear it again.

Well, they were not only still together but stronger than ever with an opening song that did everything they did best, rangy vocals, quirky but expressive guitar playing, catchy melody and a sense dynamics that made every verse and chorus different, propelling the song into hyperspace. The Cutter is one of my favourite songs of its time. It made 1983 feel like its own year the way that 1977 felt like Pretty Vacant or 1982 felt like World of Stone. Nothing beat it in its year.

Back of Love keeps the pace at heart attack with a shining, clipped two chord riff high on the fretboard from Will Sergeant who's already impressed with his work in The Cutter. This distinctive chopping continues under the verse until the bursting chorus adds layers, one more frenetic and another more stately. McCulloch's voice rides over the energy with an angsty tone in a tune along the modal lines of something like On Broadway before soaring to the ceiling for the chorus. "We're taking advantage of breaking the back of love." There's something else creeping in here that will keep surfacing across the album. McCulloch talked about the songs explaining the opposites within him. "I'm on the chopping block chopping off my stopping thought. Self doubt and selfism were the cheapest things I ever bought. Whether he's rasping intimately into the mic, bellowing his big tenor in the chorus or seeming to choke on his own words towards the end, his performance combines the intensity of a live gig with the precision of the studio. Again this is a band that know the power of development within each song and this one, while not as gawpingly varied as The Cutter still can't outstay its welcome as each listen surprises you again with a detail thrown in that separates verses from choruses and iterations from each other.

My White Devil takes it all down with a slow and ominous opening. A triplet bass figure and distant guitar feedback build a cinematic scene, that bass stuttering between points over the white wails. We're given a brief literary history of John Webster whose The White Devil gave this song its title before the song kicks into a more cruisy rock groove that either of its predecessors. A descending guitar figure suggests more Eastern influence with its sitar-like hammer on pattern. It's unclear to me that McCulloch's lyric is derived from Webster's stark work but The White Devil does contain a scene of fatal betrayal in which a dying character speaks of his confusion at facing death. "Change in the nether. Do I get the choice? Chance it forever. When do we get the spoils" suggests a similar state.

Clay approaches from the distance with metallic groans bending downward by the time it gets there it's a rapid machine, all stuttering clanks and low saws. McCulloch comes in with a cheerful melody that's almost boppy but the words say otherwise: "Am I the half of half and half or am I the half that's whole?" The scission is back, one side looking at the other and either not recognising it or just not liking what it sees. "When I was the Cain, you were the Abel." It begins with this mix of dark guitar rock and bright vocals and keeps coursing that way until the sinewy guitars start slithering around the chords and the voice finds new puzzles of duality, groaning here, sighing there and then, of course soaring to the heights of his voice. It's happy and angry but doesn't sound like any rock and roll that happened before it. Ratting tom toms supported by that solid bass with the guitars either hammering in the distance like stressed sheets of steel or screaming through saws. "When I came apart I was made of sand. When you fell apart clay crumbled in my hands." He sings it in a low rasp for the last pass before hitting the operatics again, pausing for the line about Cain and Abel before one final celestial declaration before the sudden end, the clanks falling into the distance.

Porcupine starts with drums that sound like slowed down cat o' nine tail lashes. A big reverby acoustic guitar strums rapidly like a flamenco figure that doesn't finish. High electrics whine in descent. The mood is minor. McCulloch starts in big throat mode with an angsty lament that feels epic. "There is no comparison between things about to happen. Missing the point of our mission, will we become misshapen?" A fall into another pendulum of minor chord to fifth and the voice is closer. This is kept longer than usual for a song by this band as the huge, icy atmosphere envelopes. There's an instrumental section in a slightly lighter mode with bells and lower strings that ends in a beautiful breath as the harmonic ground is reset for the return of the lament, it reverses the order of the parts with the high melody overlapping and taking over the more closeted one. And then with a bright chord we're moving. The drums pick up and the song begins to gallop. Big clean electric chords. The vocal comes in, muttering and growling at first, unintelligible wherever we were it's different now, fleeing, flying escaping. Soon McCulloch is wailing above it, suffering or elated, it's hard to tell. Will Sergeant's guitar squeaks and screeches rise as the song fades to the end of the side and McCulloch is finally comprehensible as he screams: "I'm beginning to see the light."

Side two starts with a gentle acoustic arpeggio which quickly kicks in to an energetic arrangement that harks back to The Cutter with Eastern portamentos in the lower strings and sitar-like guitar figures. A thrilling forceful ride. "What if no one's calling? God, then, must be falling." Heads Will Roll. No idea but it works.

Then we come to the album's speedbump. Ripeness is all clean funk and the suggestion of raga-like rock but it's wrong. I'm not sure if it's the lack of the orchestration or the plainness of the guitar band arrangement but this one lays the formula too bare and it falls flat. It feels like bits of the other songs thrown together to sound like an Echo and the Bunnymen song. McCulloch even does the soaring vocal bit on time.

Here's the thing, not just about this band but a lot of them. Like quite a few lyricists that wrote their own vocal parts, McCulloch at this stage is either caught unawares in his own formula or simply sticks with what he knows. Ripeness repeats the list-like pattern of most Echo and the Bunnymen songs. You could almost put any of the following lines in any opening verse in the three albums up to this one: "If I said, I'd lost my way", "We're on the seventh floor, brewing alternatives", "Where am I going? Where have I been?", "The man at the back has a question" and so on. The craft comes in how the songs open up and introduce more melodic material over expanding arrangements. If you take most of that away and you don't do enough work to make the next one stand on its own you get filler. Ripeness isn't so bad, in and of itself, it's just that it's set among jewels.

Like Higher Hell. A a worrying distant guitar figure with a deliberately unresolved 9th interval. McCulloch's opening verse obeys the figure described above but the chorus and growing swell of keyboards and strings beneath prevent it from sounding rote. And the chorus takes us right to the heart: "Just like my lower heaven, you know so well, my higher hell." Long, atmospheric action sequences bring us back to the doom and weave together until the vocal round of the extended fade. A satisfying dirge.

A gymnastic bass figure brings us into Gods Will be Gods as the drums play time and a melodica noodles brightly. A few opening lines and we're galloping. Momentum builds as the extended verses play to bright motion on the guitars. McCulloch plays with the modal melody of the verse figure. What sounds like a backwards guitar break (but could be delay plus volume pedal) introduces huge chorused open chords and the speed keeps up. "Gods will be gods but my god forgot I was made out of skin." And then, before you get too comfortable, it cuts out.

Bluer Skies starts with the relaxing sound of low tide. Electronic percussion slaps to life over a chunky bass. The verse is another list but breaks into a beautiful high voiced chorus. Repeat until the second chorus which is lifted by a three-note keyboard figure. Repeat but the verses are more withdrawn, weary. "I know belief is in your eyes. We can't believe in blind light." "I'm counting on your heavy heart to keep me from falling apart." Fade on the organ riff until the tide comes back in.

Ok so, this has been long, longer than I'd planned. It's just that this album keeps coming back and in a way that few from its time come back. The Cutter was a single and came with a video that mixed the band miming the song in a practice room with lo-fi back projection intercut with footage from the cover shoot done in Iceland. It was both performative and oddly cinematic at a time when music videos were growing so overblown that their scene's sound effects were louder than the music (YouTube Union of the Snake by Duran Duran for proof) but this brought the music itself front and centre. They were nothing like the grand images in my head when I heard the song but they didn't detract from it. The thrilling newness and energy of it began the year for me. It might sound feeble triumph now but it felt like the year was in good hands.

I was in third year university and good at it. I'd run out of the cinema electives and was forced to take subjects from modern history and contemporary culture. Most of these were ok but apart from the main study areas the year was down to hitting my marks and saying my lines, grabbing a distinction where I could. It gave me pause to take the music in more fully and what I noticed was that the fury of invention that post punk had been releasing was being decisively absorbed by the mainstream. There was plenty of good culture below the radar but as only the crowd-friendliest was going to hit the surface and get taken up, the best of it was destined once more for the obscurity of the bottom of the flow.

I was twenty and in this year I filled in for a guitarist in Brisbane band's first Sydney gigs, formed my own band, did studio recordings, played live and was played on the radio. It was effectively my indy music career in a single year (not an unusual trajectory). I changed nothing but had great fun trying. Backed by this kind of greatness that showed bands that were unquestionably rock but well beyond the creaking strains of blues rock influences could produce such worlds on sides of vinyl. It felt comfortable. That's not the word you should be using about such a post punk powerhouse of a record but all I mean by it is that I and anyone who wanted to continue looking beyond the cock rock revival that was waking back up in the venues and on the media could keep turning their lab tests into songs. It wasn't going to last but he best stuff never does.