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Originally Posted by eternal
Anybody seen Swans this year?
After seeing them at a short outdoor festival set, I saw them on Friday in Toronto. Good show but I was a little underwhelmed to be honest (It's easy to hype up Swans too much I suppose). The set seemed to be waaay too drone-y (even for Swans!) which is incredibly hard for me to say.
My biggest beef though was the removal of "The Apostate" from the setlist and replacing it with some boring drone song they are coming up with. The apostate is absolutely killer live so I was a little heartbroken about missing that incredible lap steel sound that Christoph does throughout and that 2nd half dance break. Also by taking out "the Apostate", Christoph seemed to have little to do during the show and was often found just toking on his little portable vaporizer thing. The show just didn't have as much groove as we've come to expect from reformed Swans.
That being said, groove was certainly present in the closer "black hole man" which was the highlight of the set. But waiting almost 3 hours to get to a groove was definitely testing my patience a bit. Not bad at all, but just not what I've come to expect from Gira & co. in recent years.
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saw them twice a couple of weeks ago, and to my surprise really enjoyed it. went to their headline show supported by oren ambarchi, who frankly shat on them as did htrk who I saw beforehand, as I can't help but see their new groove-based songs (a little god in my hands et al) as pandering and dull, whereas those billowing drones they played were utterly incredible, reminded me more of the 2011/2013 tours. the second set the next day was a condensed festival set and they essentially untethered the whole thing from rhythm and it was just excellent. just a little boy is really the only taker I have from to be kind and live it's enormous. new stuff also sounding solid, although it's likely going to be the same problem I had with the last two records, that being gira's proclivity to play the best stuff live and then fill out the overlong records with really slight songs.