Swans

Legendary SWANS premiered the first song, A Little God In My Hands, from their upcoming album, To Be Kind, which will be released on May 13th via Young God / Mute. Two years ago, in 2012, SWANS released their masterpiece album The Seer. Now they are with To Be Kind, which features collaborations with ST. VINCENT‘s Annie Clark, Little Annie, Cold Specks, and Bill Rieflin.

Listen to A Little God In My Hands, download the song for free, and watch the cover artwork of To Be Kind.

SWANSTo Be Kind album artwork features different baby images. Michael Gira, the original Swan, shared some words on how he came across the conceptual artist Bob Biggs, who did To Be Kind‘s artwork:

I first met Bob Biggs in Los Angeles in 1976/77, through friends in the so-called punk scene there. He was a conceptual artist, but like everyone else with a brain, he was enthralled with the sudden and concussive events endemic to the rise of the beautifully scabrous punk explosion at the time. He was “outside” of it (as was I, in retrospect), but also in it, and had a sardonic view of it simultaneously. I distinctly remember him arriving at the infamous (genesis site of LA Punk) Masque Club, with a Semi Truck bearing a a fully grown, mucous-dripping cow, and leading it down a ramp into the club, where it ambled about, shat, and was then led out. I’m not certain what this was supposed to actually mean, but it was a delightful event, nevertheless.
Later, I was at the house of a friend (and a friend of Bob’s), and I noticed an unfathomable image on the wall. It was a pastel of one of the baby images we are now using as the art for the new Swans album. An uncanny visual cipher, and it stuck with me, all these years… I look at Bob’s baby images as something like the Mona Lisa—utterly inscrutable, but ACHING to reach up to the surface. Or like one of Jasper Johns’ flag paintings—I just can’t figure them out, but they keep calling me back.





I recall asking Bob in 1981 or so if I could use one of those baby images for a record, and he said, definitively, NO.
But those images have remained in the back of my head since then, always nagging. It seems they’re always calling me, calling, calling…

I’m delighted that these images, finally with Bob’s consent, can now act as innocent, but implacable sentinels for the music of Swans, after all these years.





.. God Bless Bob Biggs…

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SWANS

via FACT and Pitchfork