Audiences would not be amiss to approach The Corner Hotel with just a touch of trepidation tonight.
Post-punk stalwarts Swans have somewhat of an infamous reputation for their live shows. Apart from being renowned for playing at ear-bleedingly loud volume, notoriously cantankerous lead singer Michael Gira has been known to heckle and beat up the crowd, even turning off the air conditioning prior to their sets to make everyone as uncomfortable as possible.
So after a 13 year hiatus, following the band’s split in 1997 and subsequent reformation in 2010, the question is, will Swans have mellowed out or are they back with more bile than ever?
Gira must have decided to go relatively easy on the Melbourne punters tonight because he’s gifted them Christoph Hahn as the support act.
Is providing your band’s own guitarist as a support something of a vanity statement? In any case, they have the right to a little vanity.
Hahn, perched alone at the front of the stage with only his guitar for accompaniment, delivers some hauntingly beautiful melodic country desert rock numbers.
Heavy on reverb and the looping pedal, Hahn sings in English, German, and French, with a mix of originals (“This one is about a train ride to the funeral of a friend who was very dear to me” he tells the audience after one number sung in German – “scheisse, now I’m going to be sad”) and covers (including a track by seminal desert rock band Thin White Rope).
With his low gritty voice and wry banter between songs, Hahn gathers a circle of appreciative listeners and sets the perfect atmospheric tone for the band to come.
Swans appear, launching straight into new song “To Be Kind”, and send the audience, a mixed bag of older punk types and younger indie kids, scrambling for their earplugs.
A six-piece in their current incarnation, the volume is as much of a sonic thunderclap as ever. Gira looks like a man deranged as he stands at centre of stage, his long grey hair hanging down into his grizzled face as he chants and whirls around, arms flapping wildly.
The song ends and Gira squints over the crowd at the sound desk. “Can you put a light on the lyrics!? Like we discussed,” he mutters snidely, drawing mock gasps from the audience. Clearly a 13 year break hasn’t done much to put him in a better mood.
Describing Swans’ sound is a tricky business. Their albums are like an avant-garde art project, steeped in a No Wave industrial rock aesthetic. Equally elegant and ugly, they’ve been described as sounding like heavy metal in slow motion.
Often filled with clanking, mechanical-like instrumentation and vocals devoid of melody, their songs nonetheless manage to create a tangible atmosphere and emotional intensity.
As the lighting issue is resolved and the band catapult themselves into the next number, it soon becomes clear that Swans’ music is even more unsettlingly brilliant in the flesh.
With the aid of two drum kits and a mountain of amps, they unleash a wall of sound, driven by a solid, hammering rhythm section.
Delicate keys float across the pounding bass line, creating a discordant harmony, while violin, xylophone, clarinet, and lap steel guitar are all layered over the songs at various moments, making a murky, intoxicating post-punk soup.
“Coward”, which begins with a cascade of double drumming from percussionists Thor Harris and Phil Puleo, is easily a highlight of the set.
The vintage Swans track, from 1986’s Holy Money, is a favourite of the crowd. With his back to the stage, waving his arms aggressively at the band like a lunatic conductor, Gira’s vehement black humour is in full force. “Put your knife in me/I love you” he sings, when he’s not turning around to berate Puleo, who’s starting to look particularly pissed off.
Band and audience are both lost in the clattering cymbals and squawking guitars of the next song when bass player Chris Pravdica yells at Gira and abruptly stops playing.
Has he finally had enough of Gira’s haranguing, which has been constant throughout the set? “It appears we’ve blown up an amplifier” Gira announces to delighted cheers from the crowd.
As the night slinks on, songs are not so much delineated as layered into one another, a blanket of ominous sound punctuated by high pitched whistles and screeching guitars.
The band draws the listeners into the slow, submerged guitar rhythms and syncopated drum beats before driving each song towards a thrashing climax. A sea of heads nod in rapturous unison.
After a monumental jam with haunting harmonica, reverberating gong-striking and theatrical monk-like chanting from Gira, the ensemble close the titanic two hour set with a track from new album The Seer.
The final applause from the ecstatic audience is prolonged, heartfelt and ear splittingly cacophonous – just, one imagines, the way Swans would like it.
