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***Michael Gira has always been good at establishing finality. Each successive Swans release would have made a spectacular tombstone or constituted an epitaph for which other groups would have killed. Soundtracks for the Blind is no exception to the rule, but this time around even by his own high standards and compared to his low-end excursions of yore, Gira has exceeded himself. As dramatic excursions go, Soundtracks equals the best. Running over two CDs and two-and-a-half-hours, this would be a grueling enough listen even without the bejeweled brilliance of the ten actual songs nestled among the found-soundscapes, ambient decompositions and twisted electronic noises that constitute the album's remaining sixteen fragments. What is hard to convey in print however, is the flow of the album as a whole, the manner in which a vocal track alternates with an instrumental, the carefully crafted ordering which, ultimately, does so much to gloriously disorient the listener. Soundtracks' sheer length and immensity are its own best explanation. At least a dozen other groups have essayed similar ventures in recent years: Total, Final and Ice's isolationism; the Cold Meat Industry roster's dark industrial ambience; Merzbow and other Japanese artists' harsh noise... But these artists' collective resonance and weight don't compare; their 60-minute limited-edition, two-track CDs seem insignificant next to this. Rather, it's more accurate to compare the Swans and Soundtracks for the Blind to the legacy of the Velvet Underground as they should have been, and not as they were bowdlerized by the Jesus and Mary Chain; to the drone language developed by La Monte Young that was such an influence on the Velvets; to "Venus in Furs" and John Cale's Music for a New Society. Soundtracks is the perfect wake for a band whose impact on music has yet to be calculated: Swans' out-and-out noise may have now receded into quietude and somnolent landscapes, but this monster of an album will leave ripples pulsing out for many years to come. |
