In most types of music, from afrobeat to zydeco, the older a performer happens to be, the more respect he or she is typically afforded. In fact, it’s not even so much a question of age. Most elder statespersons are venerated for a comprehensive understanding of their craft, gleaned from years of experience, rather than the mere number of days they’ve graced this mortal coil. Rock n’ roll, on the other hand, tends to veer in the opposite direction. Terms like “too old” and “washed up” get bandied about as soon as an artist reaches the age where their car insurance rates dip to a reasonable price. Rock has always been a cult of youth, immolating itself somewhere around once a decade, so that a new crop of scowling misfits can have their moment to rise from the ashes before crashing triumphantly into the used-record bins and reality television programs of tomorrow.
Given this state of affairs, it must be difficult for artists whose work thrived on some sense of danger to reach an age that all the distortion pedals in the world can’t disguise. The majority of the listening public is hesitant to consider any new work by a veteran artist to be as worthwhile as the work through which the artist made their name. For artists whose work never fully incorporated itself into mainstream consciousness, the prospect of becoming passé is a threatening one. Some fall decidedly short of early high-water marks--Greg Ginn’s jam band and Iggy Pop’s cavorting with Sum 41 come to mind--but in the face of such precedents, two long-running artists who can still do it right have released testaments to a creative spirit that ages like wine rather than cheese. Grinderman 2, the second album by the deconstructed blues-punk band fronted by Nick Cave; and My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, the first Swans album to be released in a decade and a half, came out almost concurrently. Both are excellent examples of work by artists that have neither burned out nor rusted, and remain at the peak of their respective powers.
It can be difficult to forego skepticism when examining albums like these. Given the subtlety and austerity of recent projects by the members of both bands--such as the Leonard Cohen-style piano balladry and Hollywood film scores of Nick Cave; or Swans singer Michael Gira’s work with the avant-folk outfit Angels Of Light--the prospect of either artist abandoning their recent less-is-more aesthetic in favor of simply more might seem, to the less charitable critic, like a sonic midlife crisis. That Nick Cave has had to deny that exact allegation in interviews demonstrates the power of such preconceptions. Healthy skepticism isn’t always a bad approach to attempts by aging musicians to resurrect the sounds made half a lifetime ago. However, there is also something to be said for those who, like Grinderman or the Swans, can rediscover the liberating power of loud amplifiers and the word fuck.
As far as confronting or confirming preconceptions, the two bands vary in approach. Grinderman fans will likely have some idea what the band’s newest release sounds like based on their debut album. Swans fans, however, have less to go on--the band varied wildly in timbre and tone and the promotional blurb on the cover juxtaposes phrases like “bone-crushing,” “dissonant,” and “monstrous,” with others like “contributions from Devendra Banhart.” The available facts about each album may help to prepare a listener for what they're about to hear, but, as with that of any great artist, the work ultimately speaks for itself.
With his work in Grinderman, Nick Cave creates a character, a sort of black-clad, mustachioed ne’er-do-well straight from a Flannery O’Connor novel--all frustrated lechery and greasy charisma. Even his name seems lifted straight from the Southern Gothic canon: two ascending and descending syllables running parallel to the sound of a shotgun being cocked; a first name that’s casual and unassuming paired with a surname bearing a suggestion of emptiness and darkness. It’s the sort of duality that Cave has made his own over the years: the light and the dark perpetually entangled, the menace hidden in the ordinary.
If Grinderman was an attempt to counterbalance some of the muted introspection that Cave has explored in recent years-–a safe assumption, as the band lives up to the chaotic promise of Cave’s first band The Birthday Party more often than The Birthday Party actually did--it is not as cut-and-dried a distinction as it first may appear. Just as the soft edges of his quieter material were gnawed by peril and desolation, the violent-minded, hyper-sexual content of Grinderman songs like “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” or “Worm Tamer” find a hushed counterpart in material like “What I Know.” Where the band’s first album occasionally indulged in such moments–-songs like “Man In The Moon” for instance-–the softer material seemed more like an aesthetic outlier than an integrated component of the music. This duality is rendered indistinct by newer songs like “When My Baby Comes,” which build from eerie placidity to a crashing Black Sabbath-esque coda. Cave’s ability to juggle restrained delicacy and sinister gloom, a balance which prevents him from falling into self-caricature no matter how stylized his visual or sonic aesthetic may become, has always been one of his strongest points. Whether Cave fully intended it or not, that balance remains on full display with the newest Grinderman release.
It could be said that Nick Cave tends to revert to type, although it's also true that his type evades the trap of a singular nature. Michael Gira, on the other hand, is what he is. While there has always been a mystique around him, it was never a self-constructed façade. The music he has created over the decades follows a straight line of intent stretching from the artist to the listener. Even at its most sedate, it is still as subtle as a pillowcase full of doorknobs. If Nick Cave is the Southern Gothic antagonist, Gira is a prophet howling in the wilderness--the Old Testament by way of Melville. He issues jeremiad after withering jeremiad, statements less in line with any sort of manic mysticism than with Edmund Wilson’s definition of prophecy as "the articulation of those desires and motivations which are the noblest and thereby most difficult to attain." [check this quote] “We are reeling the liars in,” Gira intones on My Father Will Guide Me’s second song. “We are burning them in a pile.” It is little surprise that his stark bluntness, as serious as damnation, remains intact. Singing lines like these, he has always seemed less like a voice than an elemental force, unbreakable and immutable.
The other constant thread running through Gira’s career is a well-defined connection between the inner life and the world at large--the debased souls which form corrupt interpersonal relationships that chisel away at society’s foundations. Beyond this overarching concern with the state of the soul and how it reflects on a macrocosmic level, Gira’s wildly varied output leaves listeners with little firm ability to pre-judge his projects with any degree of accuracy. This unpredictability has served him well over the years, allowing him room to evolve as an artist and to hold the attention of the listening public.
My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope Into The Sky is the first Swans release since 1995's Soundtracks For The Blind, an album of odds and ends which featured some of their best--and some of their worst--material. Owing to its nature as a nearly posthumous compilation, the material covered a considerable amount of ground, encompassing proto-Godspeed You Black Emperor crescendo, muted field recordings, and some ill-advised forays
into electronic territory. Considered alongside the generally folk-oriented nature of the music Gira has both written and released on Young God Records, the promise of a return to the black-hole density of early Swans material may have seemed like a difficult promise to fulfill.
And, as the sticker on the cover states, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky is a “reactivated and invigorated” Swans, “NOT [their caps] a reunion.” It may seem like a gratuitous and self-serving disclaimer, but it is good to consider. Because this is a dark, dense album-–far moreso than anything its contributors have produced in a very long time. It’s not the same sort of protracted, plodding sturm und drang of early albums like Cop or Filth. But when the buzzing drone of opener “No Words/No Thoughts” kicks in, there is no question that the resurrected Swans are as capable a noise-making unit as they were in decades past. As with Grinderman, though, this inclination towards the harsher end of the musical spectrum is tempered with restrained sonic valleys that effectively accentuate the lofty peaks of dissonance to which the band has so triumphantly returned.
The Swans were always a band who understood that a whisper could be as unnerving as a scream, and their newest album is no exception. Fortunately, Devendra Banhart does not resort to his Marc Bolan warble on “You Fucking People Make Me Sick.” His uncharacteristically subdued approach, when presented as a duet with Gira’s young daughter, is unsettling in a way that’s difficult to put into words. However, the ability to unsettle was always a defining characteristic of the Swans’ best work, whether through the violent maelstrom of their earliest albums or the eerie tranquility of their later releases. The newest album possesses the ability to disturb fans’ expectations as well, since it doesn’t continue with the simple quiet/loud dichotomy of the band’s earlier work. While there are certainly moments at both extremes, there are large swaths of grey area as well, most notably the campfire gospel inflections of “Reeling The Liars In” or the lurching graveyard waltz of “Jim.”
Both the Swans and Grinderman have proven themselves time and again as creative forces which can subvert expectations and transcend previous achievements. Cynical observers might try to box each into the category of the aging musician grasping in vain for his glory years. However, to write either album off based on clichés about age or on preconceptions drawn from either artist’s previous work misses the mark. Cave and Gira have furthered their respective reputations as chameleonic creative entities--ever shifting and evolving, pushing away from expectations like matching ends of two magnets.