[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by Glice

There's some bits around 4.55 in that Tool song where the whole band are doing variations, rhythmic ones, which slowly shift away from the main motif before making the re-emphasis more 'jarring' (in a sense) but not because they never left it. It's a trick that only really works with some good musicians. Always the problem I've had with Tool is that I can't say anything other than that they're good musicians.

Fucking exactly!

Swans have always operated with a kind of brutal minimalism - 2 or 3 note melodies, minimal variation, no signifiers of being 'musicianly'. This hasn't really changed.

Very true, and generally I find it to brutal and and abrasive, I'm into the more Jesus Lizard kind of brutality, more swing less drone. However it think that after three decades these guys in their post-proto-promutation of Swans finally made it clique. There is finally some musicality to these minimalist attacks, they discovered the depth of multi-layered production and put it together nicely. This is the only Swans album I have not only even been able to just sit through, but have stuck in heavy rotation. It has really gotten into me lately.

But these two tracks aren't so very different.

Exactly what I was trying to say with this thread, and the haterz made me regret it initially, but you and ikara's more legitimate contributions have made me instead very glad to have posted it. These bands are radically different in their approach to music, and yet they created songs very similarly.

The thing is that rock music has so very little in it that incredibly small moderations unleash legions of difference; or rather, the master differences, the overwhelming semiotic, is cultural context. Musicology doesn't really have much to say for or to rock music.

Which is exactly why the overall similarity to rock musics is what makes certain kinds of musicians and approaches better than others. That and in truth it is always a matter of the nuances of individual taste.

In that sense I've got less to say about Swans. There's almost no point talking about them in musical terms. Not a lot happens. So it kind of either clicks or it doesn't. They're much more about drilling something home than showing any signs of musicality. For me the interest has more been in the lyrics

On The Seer there really is actually a lot going on, albeit a lot of minimalist shit layered together, but it finally seems to sync and work. What is funny is I really dig tool even more so specifically for the lyrics, and this Swans album also has a certain introspective spiritual reflective tendency like Maynard. I listen to A Perfect Circle for similar reasons, Maynard seems to sync with my own way of understanding a lot of life. I like this Swans album, though, its the first time I've paid enough attention to their lyrics, it makes me want to reinvestigate

there's no 'them' and 'us' to Gira's lyrical world. Brutalist and barren but never quite spiteful or hateful.

You nailed it. It is nihilism without necessarily being cynical. Very much the mindstate of the Alexandrian Desert Fathers and the revival under the late Father Sepharim Rose. Oh yeah, I am in part connected with the whole Death to the World scene, which is why I really dig existentialism in lyrics. Too me, ALL music and ALL lyrics have the potentiality for such depth, but it is much appreciated when it is more so intended rather then a matter of serendipity.

Thank you Glice, a very inspiring post.